Corridor: Poems

by Saskia Hamilton

Overview

"Hamilton is able to sustain a complex narrative through stripped-down poems . . . leavened by a wry humor." —The New York Times Book Review

I wanted to read an essay in your wrist.
The afternoon seemed endless. Out the window,
a lane to the right was bending away,
taking with it the figure moving down it.
Alone for a quarter of an hour,
looking in, plotting the argument,
all the marks of lucidity
and brevity in that attempt,
that benefit of rhetoric:
the true but unlikely moment.
—from "Summered"

Corridor, Saskia Hamilton's third collection, is a study of motion and time. Its glanced landscapes, its lives seen in passing, render the immeasurable in broken narratives. These poems are succinct in order to travel quickly—they have unexpected distances within their reach. They are dauntless and alert in their apprehension of the natural kingdom at the frontier of so many unnatural ones. And they inhabit the realm of contemplation which, for Hamilton, is charged with eros.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555976750
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	04/29/2014
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Saskia Hamilton is the author of two poetry books, As for Dream and Divide These; editor of The Letters of Robert Lowell; and coeditor of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. She teaches at Barnard College.

Table of Contents

I

Night-Jar 5

Thaon 6

Spiral 7

Messenger 8

Fare Forward 9

Flatlands 10

In the Fall 11

Suspension 12

Compass 13

Inroads 14

Flatlands 15

Classical Experiment 16

II

Once 19

Rain Begins 20

From a Letter 21

Increase 22

En Face 23

Wintered 24

House Tour 26

To Admit 27

Ivor Gurney 28

Whorls by Bike-Lamp 29

Concertgebouw 30

Asleep Awake 31

Disuse 32

Apartments 33

On. On. Stop. Stop. 34

Leave 35

Open Country 36

Photograph: Paestum, c. 1860, Anonymous 37

II to III 38

On the Ground 39

III

In the Corridor 43

Men and Sheep 45

Zwijgen 46

Cover 47

Milk Street 48

Summered 49

An Essay on Total Colony Collapse 52

An Essay on Perspective 53

Eaves 54

Field Experiments 55

Faring 61

Night-Jar 62

After Gemini secgað 65

Notes & Acknowledgments 67

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/16/2014
Focused on each “rib and spine or/ rafter and beam” of language, Hamilton (Canal) delivers a collection of deceptively brief, lean poems. With subtle hints of noir, she favors atmospheres of night and rain, where time moves differently: “The day is over over there.” The collection is bookended by two short poems that share the title “Night-jar,” the name of a small bird that is active in the twilight hours. These birds act as a kind of portal into Hamilton’s gray world, which might be inspired by, but is not part of, a countryside that has fallen into ruin, a “wood with its innumerable pathways” to “tall grasses, fields and sheep.” Or maybe it is a landscape constructed from some “internal/ forest.” Strangers’ voices drift in and out like mist, and there is always a studied lack of clarity that gives the collection an irresistible tension: “‘The ineffable/ is everywhere in language,’/ the speaker had said/ in the huge hall where/ I sat amongst coughers.” Elsewhere in this dreamlike hall, “A door opened on another room/ its own were ajar, white doors,/ a figure removing into the shadow.” The book’s allure is in chasing that shadow, or, as Hamilton suggests, “stir the white paint,/ to change the dream.” (June)

Publishers Weekly

Focused on each ‘rib and spine or/ rafter and beam' of language, Hamilton delivers a collection of deceptively brief, lean poems. . . . Strangers' voices drift in and out like mist, and there is always a studied lack of clarity that gives the collection an irresistible tension.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“The pulsing motor in each poem is keen intelligence about complex relationship and their unimpeachable truths. It is unlike anything else, Hamilton's fundamental use of soil and earth to make a cradle for significant ideas. These are terse honest emotions, internal struggles as subtext, held up against the simple logic of country life. She takes the rusted machinery of the world and makes it beautiful.” —Washington Independent Review of Books

“Hamilton's writing has been called spare and delicate, but neither of these quite gets at the effect of her poems, which 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

“There is much to be discovered in this collection, where tenderness and detachment, intimacy and distance, conversation and poetry thoughtfully coexist. In Corridor, Saskia Hamilton displays a breadth of historical, poetical, and linguistic awareness I rarely find. I want to read these poems again and again as I look at their resounding, narrow spaces for clues to the humanity there.” —The Rumpus

From the Publisher

04/01/2014
Each of Hamilton's crystal-lit poems defines a paintinglike space in which a clean northern light settles around things "like the Dutch verb for falling/ silent that English has no accommodations for/ in the attics and rafters of its intimacies." In Hamilton's third collection of poems released in the United States (she has also published a selection in the UK and has edited the letters of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell), the title poem, "In a Corridor," likens a work of art to a room that can be entered, positing that "nothing, yet" should not be mistaken for nothing. Within the staid frame of the poem, words—a rick, a coot, or a quincunx—can startle. Like the nightjar, a bird that projects its call, the speaker is a restless traveler who can't quite be located. In the end, each piece functions as a dialog between the concrete and the abstract: "To know you not by the senses/ but by the mind, I don't mind; we are/ all solitaries. Day has been ending/ for the entirety of day." VERDICT Intricate, finely textured poems that distill and disorient; sophisticated readers will enjoy.—Ellen Kaufman, New York

Library Journal