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Biographical note:  David Hamilton edits The Iowa Review and teaches English literature at the University of Iowa. With degrees from Amherst College (AB) and the University of Virginia (PhD), he taught in Colombia and at the University of Michigan before taking his present position. The University of Missouri Press published his Deep River (2001), a memoir embedded in local history reaching far into the archaeological record. In 1992, he was a Fulbright Professor in Valencia, Spain.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844712601
ISBN-10:  1844712605
ISBN-13:  9781844712601
Author:  David Hamilton
Title:  Ossabaw
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Jun-06
Extent:  116pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  174 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  In this extraordinary debut collection, David Hamilton revitalises and extends American pastoral writing with an uncanny ability to conjure memories of childhood and moments of spiritual and physical encounter. His gift lies in combining these themes of discovery with a lyrical intelligence never far from natural speech, all delivered with profound sensitivity for people, place and natural beauty.

Main description:  Believing in invention as the art of finding things, David Hamilton has been concerned with finding what, in memory, in nature, in his reading, and in daily events, suggests a poem. Some of the results are “found poems” in the strict sense, as he samples and refashions existing texts; other poems in this remarkable book could be said to be found in the extended sense of being discovered in memory or by observation.

Comprising free verse lyrics as well as poems in recognizable forms, Hamilton demonstrates an extraordinary range, including a series of upside down sonnets, “upsodounnets” as Chaucer might have said. The long title poem carries finding to an extreme as Hamilton condenses journal entries to a collage of lyrical notes. Observation of nature is a primary subject, but not far behind comes material from daily life and the world of art — from paintings and from other texts, both early and recent.

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Table of contents:
Contents
Acknowledgments
Lovesong from the Marshes
For Rebecca
To a Later Autumn
“Go, Little Book”
Poem Ending with Lines from an Obscure Memoir
Gaudy Fox
Our Oldest Oath
Not at All Byzantine
“The Edge Is What I Have”
Festival
After Lagamon
Slender Batons
The Ballad of Bender Sutton
His Armory Show, Nights of 1958
Van Gogh Dropped
After Claes Oldenburg
Homage to Alfred Montgomery, Corn Painter
On the Last Days of Fast Time
Neither Venice Nor Belmont
Fable
Charlie Asked
Before the Jugs in Soaked Burlap, Before the Water
Flagging for Alfatox in a Middle Field
Kindnesses
Noctua
Many Moons
Marginalia Found in a Secondhand Catullus
Wulf and Eadwacer
From the Old English Riddles
Coda
Serranilla of Aranjuéz
The Arab-Andalucian Lover and His Love
Ossabaw
Dust
The Blue He Seized
Looking for Mother
Ciao
Half Music, Half Murmur
Popular Song for a Popular Season
Twenty Ways To Say Snow
Serranilla of Barranquilla
Like Smoke
Beige and Avocado
What You Can Get Away With
Too Trillium
Oriole
Blinded
Papaver
From a Journal
The Secret Lives of Trees
Foucault Would Have Said
After Maillol
Bound Each to Each
Anasazi Baskets
On Never Ending with . . .
Poison, a partially found poem
An American Suite
For Coyote, Song and Lament
The Collector
Haiku Composed During a Lecture

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Excerpt from book:  

The Secret Lives of Trees

She's much too much,
that dogwood, lifting
her slip on lightly
wooded hillsides
then finding her cheeks
multitudes of cheeks
come scarlet, come fall.

Only our pronouns
compromise her.
She may not be she
at all. Or
the attenuation
of her early blossom
conveys another

story. Pale,
they are,
mausoleum
pale, curling
from dulled purple
centers, preparing
to drift like grandmothers
from wicker rockers
on long porches.

And the leaves, the late
scarlet leaves,
are an old woman's memories,
tensing to touch
the patriarch oak to fire.

Unpublished endorsement :  The abiding accomplishment of these poems is how they lend a voice to nature, Hamilton’s most common subject. With his fluid line and graceful imagery, he creates poems that seem discovered more than written. This is among the most difficult achievements, to extend consciousness into the world without trampling what it touches. His work is transformative in the best sense, in that it deepens how we see and what we feel. I very much enjoyed encountering this mind.

Bob Hicok

Unpublished endorsement :  The poetic debut – at long last! – by an esteemed editor and memoirist, David Hamilton’s Ossabaw is a tapestry of impressions and insights, music and ideas. From translations of Anglo-Saxon riddles to blank verse lyrics, narratives, prose poetry, and found poems, this poet reveals at every turn an eye for details from the natural world, wit, and wisdom. ‘One motive for turning up next spring,’ Hamilton writes, ‘is to see how far these poppies spread.’ This book is lined with such motives, such graceful discoveries.

Christopher Merrill

Unpublished endorsement :  With their subtle craft and quiet acuity, David Hamilton’s poems are astonishingly varied. He is at home with paintings, Gertrude Stein, landscape, Catullus, haiku, Old English literature, and the personal world of memory. Most vivid for me are his poems about the natural world – whose “horizon sweeps wide”, whose ground “tugs” at your feet – poems whose fluent lines offer up the moment in its own fluidity, with images as sharply observed as the thin-bladed hoe he remembers weeding with.

Margaret Gibson

Unpublished endorsement :  David Hamilton’s Ossabaw offers us poems of profound intimacy and formal elegance. These finely made poems, forged from and by a riveting intelligence and a luminous heart, illuminate the lyric moment with a vision at once precise and generous. In these intricately calibrated poems, the past? always present, always fugitive? is drawn up like cold, dark water from a well and in it one sees and reads the riddle of memory, the riddle of the mercurial self.

Eric Pankey