A series of brief, haunting lyrics and prose fragments, the poems in As for Dream hover in suspension between states of consciousness or being. Hamilton's verse both illustrates and investigates the human experience at many different intervals: as we wake from the dream world, as we meet the loss or disruption of our desires, as we tend to the ill, and as we die. Once we cross those boundaries, does the self remain intact? These poems record and question moments when we slip from the casing of the body and the social world and try to make our way back, or find we cannot.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Finding the space where the terse confessional poem interacts with the open-ended fragment, Hamilton's debut sews together the separate worlds of id and epistemology, of sexual disillusion and fetishized cognitive oddity. "Legible Mystery" reads in its ironic entirety: "For no one understands the framework but you,/ and they really want you to give a little." Hamilton notates good and bad days, regretful moods, self-questionings and realizations whose very lack of consequence seems to shock her: "There is a bright eye in me dulled by the activity of my dreaming eye," but which is nevertheless foreboding: "Sleep while you can for tomorrow it will be morning." Hamilton tells not stories, but parts of stories--sometimes tantalizing, sometimes just insufficient--about sex and self-discovery, European travel and urban bohemia, mourning one's parents and making up characters. Though Hamilton, who is currently teaching at Kenyon College, is editing the letters of Robert Lowell, the poems owe almost nothing to him: visible precedents are instead Anne Carson ("We are all waiting to hear/ what the hook yanked-up from down there") and, in the prose poems, Robert Hass (who is thanked). Hamilton's speaker often deploys numb languor as a kind of defense, particularly against death: "I have practiced dreaming. It works sometimes" or "It is hard to imagine anyone else touching me." It often works too well, keeping dangerous emotions at arm's length or degrading into a series of faux-na‹ve pronouncements that have plenty of atmosphere but don't hold up to repeated readings. In a blurb, Jorie Graham finds in the book an "oriental glimpsing of the ineffable"; others will just find it inevitable.
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Review
"[We find] ardent and articulate perceptions in these original poems of love in extremis. We are taken, figuratively and literally, by storm." --Forrest Gander
"Hamilton is not a quiet poet, just an extremely subtle and fierce one. There is a quality of spiritual stubborness and astonishing resilience that courses through even her briefest utterances as, with grace and technical ease, she breaches the chasms that appear to divide 'experimental' poetics, classical fragments, Romantic aphoristic debris, and Oriental glimpsing of the ineffable." --Jorie Graham
"Finding the space where the terse confessional poem interacts with the open-ended fragment, Hamilton's debut sews together the separate worlds of id and epistemology, of sexual disillusion and fetishized cognitive oddity . . . Visible precedents [for these poems are] Anne Carson ('We are all waiting to hear / what the hook yanked-up from down there') and, in the prose poems, Robert Hass (who is thanked)." --Publishers Weekly
"Other people's dreams are usually boring, and those who expound on them all the more so. But Hamilton's work succeeds because it hovers somewhere between poetry and prose, between dreaming and wakefulness, between body and spirit. What she offers is not a ponderous analysis, a literal telling, or even a good translation of a single dream. Instead, she presents small fragments of dream, the pieces of sleep we can recall with absolute clarity in morning's first light or when first succumbing to night's seductive embrace . . . Hers is a pure simplicity, rather than complication stripped bare. She shuns the arbitrary images of surrealism in favor of a more organic, integrating approach whereby dream and reality can complement rather than merely oppose one another or, more playfully, where they can pretend to be each other. [This book is] a luminous exploration of the ambit where dream, memory, imagination, and longing pass into and through one another." --Kirkus Reviews
"Hamilton is not a quiet poet, just an extremely subtle and fierce one. There is a quality of spiritual stubborness and astonishing resilience that courses through even her briefest utterances as, with grace and technical ease, she breaches the chasms that appear to divide 'experimental' poetics, classical fragments, Romantic aphoristic debris, and Oriental glimpsing of the ineffable." --Jorie Graham
"Finding the space where the terse confessional poem interacts with the open-ended fragment, Hamilton's debut sews together the separate worlds of id and epistemology, of sexual disillusion and fetishized cognitive oddity . . . Visible precedents [for these poems are] Anne Carson ('We are all waiting to hear / what the hook yanked-up from down there') and, in the prose poems, Robert Hass (who is thanked)." --Publishers Weekly
"Other people's dreams are usually boring, and those who expound on them all the more so. But Hamilton's work succeeds because it hovers somewhere between poetry and prose, between dreaming and wakefulness, between body and spirit. What she offers is not a ponderous analysis, a literal telling, or even a good translation of a single dream. Instead, she presents small fragments of dream, the pieces of sleep we can recall with absolute clarity in morning's first light or when first succumbing to night's seductive embrace . . . Hers is a pure simplicity, rather than complication stripped bare. She shuns the arbitrary images of surrealism in favor of a more organic, integrating approach whereby dream and reality can complement rather than merely oppose one another or, more playfully, where they can pretend to be each other. [This book is] a luminous exploration of the ambit where dream, memory, imagination, and longing pass into and through one another." --Kirkus Reviews
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Review for As for Dream,
By
This review is from: As for Dream (Paperback)
I highly recommend the new book of poems, As for Dream by Saskia Hamilton. Hamilton rethinks how we compensate for finality--in physical death, loss, and even in unrequited love. These poems show how we modify and dissolve absolutes. The last poem of As for Dream, "The First Evening" illustrates Ms. Hamilton's dexterity in wheedling the richness of meaning out of an economy of words. "What was to come?/There was a plank between my shoulder blades/ leaning against the wall inside of me, waiting to be put to use by the workmen/ who come at six and work until three." Once read, the line speaks of a rest before being put to bodily work, then, the potential exchange of pining for fulfillment, and finally, the easy defeat of hope by time.
2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Somewhere Spirits of Trees are Aching to get Revenge,
By WordWizard "WW" (USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: As for Dream (Paperback)
I'd be the first to congratulate Hamilton on editing Robert Lowell's letters, both efficiently and gracefully, and also for her fine taste in cover art with this book (Francesca's "The Dream of Constantine"); however, neither of these masks the fact that the woman, though she tries hard, cannot write poetry. Each of the three parts of this triptych resonate with examples of depravity, angst, and oblivion...yay, yet another 'doom and gloom' poet milled from some prestigious graduate program, out to capitalize on the fact that the human condition is corruptible and ultimately pathetic. What's worse, the poems are so small that there isn't enough time to get into them, so they feel forcefully rushed. Worst of all is the white space issue: now I'm not against experimentation, even the most extreme of Dadaist revolutionary poetics, but we're talking here about a book wrought of wood from trees on which the human race depends on to contribute oxygen for our breathable atmosphere. Now if it were a book of Paul Celan's or Vasko Popa's stuff, I could understand (as both have the same condensed syntax as does Hamilton), but Hamilton herself cannot compete to make this sacrifice of trees conscienable. Better luck next time.
3 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
rude awakening,
By
This review is from: As for Dream (Paperback)
Partially its the oversized book, but there is a feeling of too much white space on nearly every page. I like what is here, but too many of her poems in this collection feel rushed and often incomplete or not taken as far as they could be taken. I want half my money back.
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