AS FOR DREAM

Hamilton’s poetry and prose inhabit the domain of dreams, a world that often makes no sense to the dreamer, much less to an outsider. Despite the affinity of poetry and metaphor, rendering dreams is an enterprise superficially more suited to prose, which has the unfortunate effect of robbing them of most of their wonder. Simply put, 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. Seeking “the breath inside the language,” her poems are short and sensuous, affording vivid glimpses of dream in which all the sensations remain intact. “When I was small I sat on the couch and kissed and kissed my own hand.” 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.

A luminous exploration of the ambit where dream, memory, imagination, and longing pass into and through one another.