The poems that engage us are often ones that don’t seem to know they’re poems; it’s as though no one ever told them, “Hey, you’re a poem — start acting like one!” Not for Saskia Hamilton the measured rollout of the traditional lyric: Instead, the four longish poems that make up ALL SOULS (Graywolf, 86 pp., paperback, $17) start when and where they want to, go where they will, break off in what should have been a middle but isn’t, and then not stop, exactly, but disappear, like the little blips and half-signals that were transmitted by Amelia Earhart as she flew … where?
Things are either about to happen in these poems or already have: The book’s first words are, “Light before you call it light graying the sky,” and later, the same speaker finds herself “Late in the season, eating a pear/that is the memory of a pear.” Hamilton was the author of four previous collections of poetry and is also known for editing other poets’ letters, notably “The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle.” She died of cancer earlier this year, and true to form, she looks back at her treatment more than she chronicles it: “Chemical burring of the tongue,” she writes, but then “Good to be on the other side/of treatment for now.”
The last pages of “All Souls” brim with references to books and paintings and people Hamilton loved. Given her tendency throughout to move rather than linger in the moment, in this part there is more than one reference to pregnancy (see “things are about to happen,” above) in the work of artists as different as Vermeer and Proust.
So what is one to make of this terse, fragmented account by someone determined to push ahead with only an occasional glimpse in the rearview mirror? It would be easy to say “All Souls” depicts a life well lived, but it might be better to think of it in the terms used often by extreme athletes such as those ultramarathoners who say the goal is not to win but to never stop running.
If you read only one poetry collection this year that uses a different species of parasitic wasp to organize each of its three sections, make it Robyn Schiff’s INFORMATION DESK: An Epic (Penguin Poets, 125 pp., paperback, $20). These ambitious members of the order Hymenoptera take home invasion to an entirely new level by burrowing into living plants or the bodies or nests of other insects to lay eggs that will hatch and become poems — I mean, more wasps. The slip is understandable, though, for while “Information Desk” is about many things, at its core is the idea that one work of art begets another.
Why wasps, though, especially parasitic ones? Probably because these poems are born of daydreaming, and when you daydream, you think of things that seem to have nothing to do with where you are and what you’re doing at the time, and it’s only later that you see the connection. As Schiff says in an endnote, she took a routine job at the information desk in the Metropolitan Museum of Art shortly after graduating from college, and “Information Desk” is a memoir of her time there written in short, staggered lines that are always perceptive and often comical, as when visitors who don’t know what museum they are in ask her where the dinosaurs are.
When she isn’t writing about bugs, Schiff refers often to the Met’s 1995 show “Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt.” Whereas 600 paintings were attributed to the Dutch master at one point, scholars have since halved that figure, the others being ascribed to, not forgers, but other painters who admired his work so much that they produced their own versions of it.
Is that a buzz I hear? Like wasps, artists of every kind both reinvent themselves and add to what Schiff calls the “gorgeous and harrowing hoard” of “magic and mundane objects” that make up the art world by inhabiting the work of others and turning it into something else. Poet, painter, sculptor: They’re all hijackers, all committing a small-c crime, one you want them to commit.
Epistolary poetry, lists, rhymes so deft you scarcely notice them, prose poems, good old-fashioned free verse: Major Jackson stocks the jukebox that is RAZZLE DAZZLE: New and Selected Poems, 2002-2022 (Norton, 264 pp., $26.95) with every kind of poem one could possibly ask for. What they share is meatiness. Together they make up a nutritionally dense smorgasbord of people (the poet’s mother, neighborhood characters, fellow poets like Gwendolyn Brooks and Derek Walcott), places (Spain, Brazil, Kenya), and artists of every kind, often paired in ways that don’t make sense until they do (Dostoyevsky and Amiri Baraka in one poem, Lacan and Holbein the Younger in another).
Bicycles also appear from time to time in “Razzle Dazzle,” and indeed, the reader is carried effortlessly through this rich panorama as though perched on the poet’s handlebars, starting from the North Philly of his childhood (especially in the early poems) and always returning there.
Of course, when you’ve been around as much as the speakers in these poems have, by now everything that was external is within as well: As a new poem entitled “It Must Be the Supermarket in Me” observes, mature artists spend a lot of time shopping in the store of the self, because that’s “where you’ll find my feelings and/memories.” A related poem called “Major and I” playfully conjures an alter ego with the author’s first name and admits that this other Major rather than himself is “probably” the real author of these poems.
Whoever is doing the writing here, he’s trying to get his licks in before the end: “I want to be/all razzle-dazzle before the dark-cloaked one/arrives for a last game of chess,” says one poem, in reference to the iconic scene in Ingmar Bergman’s cinematic duel-with-death classic “The Seventh Seal.” Another poem ends, “I do not regret my little bout with life.” Really, though, it’s a big bout. The whole world is in these poems.
David Kirby teaches English at Florida State University and is the author, most recently, of “Help Me, Information.”
