All Souls: Poems

(Paperback)

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'Celebrating the incredible moral clarity, beauty, fearlessness and power of the spirit of Saskia Hamilton - and of her poetry' Jorie Graham

'To read Saskia Hamilton's opening poem in her forthcoming collection, All Souls, is to move through time in acts of seeing and of noting what is seen . . . For now, the day seems to say, Let the ordinary amaze, it's the grace we hold . . . Like the eighteenth-century abolitionist poet William Cowper . . . Hamilton rests her sights on what can be apprehended from a bed, sofa, chair, or window, and named in the quotidian. These small recognitions ensure a life's weightiness, wariness, worthiness' Claudia Rankine

In All Souls, Saskia Hamilton transforms compassion, fear, expectation, and memory into art of the highest order. Judgment is suspended as the poems and lyric fragments make an inventory of truths that carry us through night's reckoning with mortal hope into daylight. But even daylight - with its escapements and unbreakable numbers, 'restless, / irregular light and shadow, awakened' - can't appease the crisis of survival at the heart of this collection. Marked with a new openness and freedom - a new way of saying that is itself a study of what can and can't be said-the poems give way to Hamilton's mind, and her unerring descriptions of everyday life: 'the asphalt velvety in the rain.'

The central suite of poems vibrates with a ghostly radioactive attentiveness, with care unbounded by time or space. Its impossible charge is to acknowledge and ease suffering with a gaze that both widens and narrows its aperture. Lightly told, told without sentimentality, the story is devastating. A mother prepares to take leave of a young son. Impossible departure. 'A disturbance within the order of moments.' One that can't be stopped, though in these poems language does arrest and in some essential ways fix time.

Tenderness, courage, refusal, and acceptance infuse this work, illuminating what Elizabeth Hardwick called 'the universal unsealed wound of existence.'

Reviews

Saskia Hamilton is not a quiet poet, just an extremely subtle and fierce one. There is a quality of spiritual stubbornness and astonishing resilience that courses through even her briefest utterances -- Jorie Graham
Hamilton writes short, smart, sometimes enigmatic poems that seem carved out of driftwood, or old bones -- David Orr * New York Times Book Review *
Hamilton's poems are as passionate in their austerity, and as austere in their passion, as Hopper or Hardy -- Dan Chiasson * New Yorker *
Hamilton's poems are delicate only in the way a suspension bridge is: neither is marked by unnecessary ornament or fragility, and it would be a mistake to regard either as anything other than rigorously tough -- Raymond McDaniel * Boston Review *

Author Bio

Saskia Hamilton is the author of Corridor and two previous poetry collections, As for Dream and Divide These, and a selection of her poems, Canal, published in Britain. She is the editor of The Letters of Robert Lowell, and co-editor of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. She taught at Barnard College and lived in New York. Saskia Hamilton died in 2023.