One’s Own Evidence

Saskia Hamilton, who died of cancer this June at 56, was an honorary, late-adopted member of Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell’s circle. She met Hardwick in 1989, having arrived in New York City from Ohio for graduate school, and became her assistant. She was quickly put to work cataloguing the papers of Hardwick’s former husband, Robert Lowell, who died in 1977. Those papers eventually formed, in part, The Letters of Robert Lowell (2005), which Hamilton selected, edited, and introduced.

That book’s framing essay is a masterclass. Hamilton writes about Lowell’s voice—and performance—in prose versus the voice of his sculpted poems, and offers readers a candid, witty, regretful new side of him. It was the first of her many attentive interventions in Lowell and Hardwick’s afterlives. She also co-edited Words in Air (2008), Lowell’s correspondence with Elizabeth Bishop, and engineered a choral, monumental The Dolphin Letters (2019), an epistolary portrait of Lowell, Hardwick, and their milieu. Also in 2019, she annotated a new edition of Lowell’s The Dolphin, the controversial, Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection, first published in 1973, in which he excerpted letters that Hardwick sent to him after he left her for another woman.

In her introduction to Lowell’s letters, Hamilton notes the “just-starting quality of the thought” of Lowell the correspondent, and describes him as “a racehorse in a stall tensed for release onto the track of a poem.” A sense of the “just-starting quality of the thought,” of being stalled then released, marks Hamilton’s own first collection of poems, As for Dream (2001). It’s a book full of various pressures: the tension of love and death; the balance of recognition and withdrawal; the veil between waking and sleep. Hamilton is fascinated here by weights and measures. “[T]he work of this lifetime and the next weigh the same,” she writes in “At Eighty-Four,” “And waking from the dream was making room for death.” As for Dream is concerned with change and flux, with shifting states and necessary transition. Hamilton’s lyrics, mostly short and vacuum-packed, are love poems, as well as meditations on the genre of love poetry. Wry and wise, rich in the sort of vulnerable heartbreak one values in Lowell but more open, they’re poised somewhere in the small hours:

To prove that I love you, I would carry you anywhere,
I would follow any bus down the worst road.
I would even forget you, if that would convince you.
 
(“Early Winter”)

There’s a sense of Hamilton embracing the possibilities of the lyric itself—a sense, too, of the ineffable, of the unconscious or subconscious, tinging the atmosphere of As for Dream with a mix of the ominous, the unbidden, and the intruded-upon:

Something unconscious yesterday lifted
the edges with a shovel and slipped in.
It wasn’t alive, it was no living thing.
 
(“For Want Of”)

Hamilton’s mordant wit is especially sharp given its proximity to loss throughout. Several elegiac poems in her debut collection recall hospitals, last words, and lives carrying on after a death in the family. They are poems built on emotional symbolism, as in the aching second stanza from “Sorrow in the Body”:

Black juice and boiled rice.
You’re going to be here
way too long.

Many poems proceed with a kind of dream logic but never go so far as outright surrealism. They reach for whatever “organizing principle” they can salvage from their debris, punctuated by cigarettes or minutes, at once concrete and lived through. It’s a book of sensation, in which bodily evidence might be figured a truer knowledge than the lies and manipulations of language. Love becomes a cousin, or a surrogate, of grief:

                The grief has its sources
but often moves in no relation to them. It
wants to touch everything. Whenever I see you,
I want to touch everything.
 
(“The Apology”)

Whether consciously or otherwise, the poems in Hamilton’s sophomore collection, Divide These (2005), read as if they’re in conversation with her introduction to Lowell’s letters, published that same year. There’s a quality of “noticing what is going on behind what is going on,” as she says of Lowell’s aims at becoming “self-possessed.” Hamilton is often interested here in the act of speech, of the effort required for setting out in language, or the difficulty of reaching across silence: “the mind before it enters the house / of tenuous relationship, of starting, / of settling, of keeping still,” she writes in “The Weight of the Inside of the Body.” Many of these poems concern the rational ordering and shaping of thought and experience, a heightened version of the suggestions and implications of As for Dream. Hamilton once again uses repetition—of titles and phrases (“the labyrinth suggests a center” recurs)—along with other nagging attempts to refine experience, or at least rationalize it. “No reason for order but order / persists” she writes in “Inside,” a line that runs counter to some of the collection’s other poems that push and pull toward and away from being “unstillable,” arbitrary, or otherwise unknowable. “The path was not one way it was any way” she writes in “Year One,” which, in turn, recalls a line from Lowell’s poem “Hospital”: “They walk / the one life offered from the many chosen.”

The Hamilton of Divide These is, in some ways, a version—albeit transplanted and self-aware—of the “New England character” she outlines in her introduction to Lowell’s letters, via this description by Henry Adams:

The habit of doubt; of distrusting his own judgement and of totally rejecting the judgement of the world; the tendency to regard every question as open; the hesitation to act except as a choice of evils…the passion for companionship and the antipathy to society…

Hamilton is a vivid sensualist, and a subtle love poet. One of the only ways of holding out against the pervasive sense of loss, alienation, and speechlessness, of using “the wrong / instrument for insight” (“She Did Not Want to Hear Me Finish a Sentence”), is through an implicating sense of connection, one that involves both the body and the mind—“as if to hear were to touch you,” she writes in “One by Two.”

In her introduction to Lowell’s letters, Hamilton also notes, via T.S. Eliot, a crucial difference between poetry and prose: “The usual marks of punctuation themselves are differently employed.” Lowell claimed he was naked without his line-ends. In her own poems, Hamilton makes idiosyncratic, effective use of the colon. Its connectivity and suggestive sense of association become crucial tools of ongoing-ness and loose but unquestionable relation:

sidewalk slip down: step up
to the inside, empty from now
to the next commonwealth:
wherever we are we repeat ourselves:
 
or the alternative:
or the appearance of the god:
the hour: the old one: the mouth,
pared from rock and brought
 
(“Precisions as to Place”)

Hamilton’s third collection, Corridor (2014), features many of the by-now familiar obsessions, but they’ve sharpened further toward accuracy, reaching the kind of “equipoise” she would later write of with regards to The Dolphin. Her elegant, spare lyrics, underlaid with the expansive life of the mind, create a geography or horary of sorts for the interior world, the “internal // forest of hours” (“Fare Forward”). Once again, it’s a book of limits and separations, taking place “on the outer wheel of knowing” (“Field Experiments”). It plays with a tender, direct address, the you of the ode, of the eavesdropped-upon lover’s speech, while also complicating time as a sort of physical terrain, a place to be visited and navigated:

           In the night, the bed was as long
as the hours, the hours were as long as the road
or the future, the past was not our destiny
 
(“Once”)

Corridor is perhaps her strongest collection in terms of its ability to create and sustain an emotional ambience, to leave a charge in the air. The whole seems to take place on “the off-beat” (“En Face”) of a love affair, marked as much by its freedom and pleasures as by its implicit distances and innate, ongoing warning signs:

Heavy smell of summer in the trees.
The Oxford Book of Fugitives stands on the shelf
in the shuttered house. Such sleep and peril
in the caution. The cautious student of lust
reads and sleeps and does not hear the voices
that ring in her ears, why wake to regret
in the warning, buoyant regret.
 
(“Field Experiments”)

That “buoyant regret’” might almost sum up the mood. There seems to be a baked-in shelf life, an expectation of endings, hinted at throughout:

           It is said that,
after paradise, after a time,
the unfallen animals came
down the road and went
 
their separate ways: peacock, boar,
pheasant, rabbit; small birds roved
the fields and hedges; expanding under-
storeys of holly in woodlands;
 
(“Classical Experiment”)

There are crucial Lowellian gestures toward giving things their “living name”—as per Lowell’s poem “Epilogue”—and toward memory. But also, almost in a preparatory mood for Hamilton’s work on The Dolphin, there’s much to do with the vacillations and isolations of love at a distance, love stalled, or as a dangerous, martial game: “only one of us has to make a move / for our troubles to be told and halved” (“An Essay on Perspective”). There is also, as in Lowell, after he lapsed from his fire-breathing Catholicism, the weight of that “after paradise,” which is another reason to try for perfection in the work, in the here and now, through the precise rendering of speech.

All Souls (Graywolf Press, 2023) is Hamilton’s final, posthumous book. Its elegance and composure would be extraordinary under any circumstances, but are especially so given that Hamilton wrote in the shadow of a terminal prognosis. There is a new stride in her writing, a more pronounced narrative drive, and a previously unseen capacity for sustained, lyric prose. “Who was it who said that every narrative is a soothing down” she asks in “Faring.” There is a sense of becoming becalmed, of, again, writing toward an ending.

The collection is a dramatic rendering of Hamilton as both a writer and a reader, a rhapsodic conversation between her library and her life. It’s a book in dialogue with her editorial work. In her introduction to The Dolphin Letters, Hamilton quotes T.S. Eliot on writers’ correspondence and their ability to offer “that internal history which may have much or may have little relation to the external facts, that internal crisis over which our imagination is tempted to brood too long.” All Souls might be said to be a kind of imaginative, often philosophical, brooding, but hardly one that goes on too long. The collection is more in keeping with Hardwick’s approach to self-investigation than with Lowell’s unsparing candor. (In fact, it’s akin to Hardwick’s 1979 novel Sleepless Nights in its capacity to combine memoir with what one has read or written, a patchwork of voices and influences that forms a suggestive polyphony.) Where time has always been one of Hamilton’s great subjects, in All Souls it comes into crueller focus.

Some of the poems are crushing in their matter-of-fact reckoning. “Half our days spent living in the future, an illusion,” she writes in “Faring,” but she eschews morbidity in favor of an “insuppressibility, of thought,” noted via Bashō, another enduring influence on Hamilton’s work. Time is one of the chief matters which thought here alights on. “Each passerby carries time internally,” she writes in “Faring.” In the tellingly-titled “Exits and Entrances to the Auditorium,” she riffs on a line from Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal (itself lifted from the Book of Revelation): “silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.” This becomes the basis for a more philosophical, materialistic discussion:

Not time and space but time as space. The space you take up on
earth is a period of time, set by luck or the spinner, the allotter, the
one with scissors.

As so often in Hamilton’s writing, time, as well as life, is encountered and rendered using the toolkit of language, through its component parts and its heuristic tricks. In the book’s title sequence, this plays out in the slippage of both address and tense:

Who becomes familiar with mortal
illness for very long. I was a stranger, &c.
Not everyone appreciates it, no
one finds being the third person
becoming, it’s never accurate,
and then one is headed for the past tense.

Again, the idea of accuracy is another Hardwickian instinct—a drive toward precision, the ability to peel away layers of received wisdom or lazy thought to get to veracity, a disavowal of the poorly rendered.

Another insight from Hamilton’s introduction to The Dolphin Letters could just as well apply to All Souls:

Working with the same raw materials as poetry and fiction—noticings, moments of attention and inattention, formal concerns—letters process their material differently, and may store it in anticipation of poems or fictions for years. The habits of mind, association, and phrasemaking are as much prospective as retrospective.

Something of this procedure goes on in All Souls. In the book’s “noticings, moments of attention and inattention,” it is at once a collection of poems and a gathering of thoughts on the wing, in real-time; a storehouse of images, moments, and “formal concerns” which has the quality of a notebook. All Souls is also, in necessary ways, “prospective” and “retrospective,” offering a lot of heavy thinking about what the future means and ways of “marking time,” but also resilient presentism. There are discussions of suspension, anticipation, and chronology—the immediate in difficult relation to an unpromised, foreshortened next stage. “What practice will help prepare me,” Hamilton asks in “Exits and Entrances to the Auditorium,” the implicit question mark absent—one of many absences.

Allusive, imaginative leaps add to the air of surprise throughout these poems and, in turn, invoke surprise—the surprise of the dead in literature, their shocked unpreparedness:

You can tell the dead from the living in the old poems by their surprise
at the guides. Where they’re heading, no guides, just a crowd
gathered at the shore, where it’s quiet

There’s friction between this sense of “no guides” and the many instructive, vital sources and forebears upon whom Hamilton’s poems draw for wisdom. There’s friction, too, between her propulsive dual engines, one running on anticipatory thoughts and one already operating in a sort of knowing conclusiveness, a finite kind of meditation: “Knowing comes later, later may be / aftermath, or prelude” (“All Souls”).

The title sequence uses repetition and symbolism as it moves toward an astonishing ending that’s at once suggestive of Emily Dickinson yet entirely original:

the driver swung the doors shut
and I waved at the children pressing their faces
to the windows as it drove towards the river.
May they all be covered by feathers.

This moment helps secure the other binding thread of the book: the annunciation and the maternal. The book’s final part, “Museum Going,” includes a discussion of Vermeer and the famous blue of his milkmaid’s apron and the dress the subject wears in Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (c. 1663). These references are simultaneously an elliptical way to ponder “impending departure” and a way to bring in the quietly miraculous and allegorically loaded. Rather than dwelling on the “seamy side” of death, this allows Hamilton to once again lean on Eliot, who, in an essay about the English playwright John Marston, writes of “a pattern behind the pattern into which the characters deliberately involve themselves”:

the kind of pattern which we perceive in our own lives only at rare moments of inattention and detachment, drowsing in sunlight. It is the pattern drawn by what the ancient world called Fate

For all her characteristically attentive attachment, Hamilton here, as so often, also manages to capture something of this quality of revelatory drowsing in sunlight, this pattern-catching gracefulness and fidelity:

I had the sensation, upon reading again of the pregnant young woman,
of discovering the very structure of my thinking about the letter-reader
in Vermeer…one could look at it without ever thinking of the
annunciation, a thought perhaps symbolized but nowhere expressed
except in the color blue.

In her introduction to The Dolphin Letters, Hamilton describes letters as partly being “one’s own evidence” and, in All Souls, she provides just such evidence of the life of her mind, and does so in the face of impossibility, in the company of years. The result is an act of uncovering and recovery, capable at once of holding the different tenses in unity while remembering, and monumentalizing, as they unfolded, “the good days ahead, the winter gifts / yet to be gifted.”