There is a lot to love about Saskia Hamilton’s poems. What I find particularly impressive is how much atmosphere she can create in such a compressed space, which was made even more apparent by the physical dimensions of her first book As for Dream (Graywolf, 2001), which was exaggeratedly large for how small the poems are. I guess I define what I mean by atmosphere. I think of atmosphere as being expressed through what is not said; a reader gets a sense of atmosphere when it feels like the context from which the poem has been taken is vast, mysterious and worth knowing more about.
Atmosphere is when the white space around the poem almost becomes a physical presence and makes you aware of all that is missing. Atmosphere seems to be not really an effect achieved by any technical elements, but is rather a matter of narrative in which the poet chooses to say just enough to leave the reader both thwarted and enticed by the unknown in the poem. When atmosphere goes wrong, it either becomes cryptic–when what is given from an implied context isn’t meaningful enough to make us interested in what surrounds it–or it becomes melodrama, when the context we infer doesn’t seem to justify the solemnity the poem seems to be asking of its readers. Almost without exception, Hamilton’s poems are able to achieve atmosphere (by the way, I think some other poets that excel at atmosphere are Linda Gregg, Carl Phillips and Rae Armantrout). For example, here is Hamilton’s “A Story”:
There was the story of the car lying on its side
when the child came upon it.
This was the child’s dream. The car was an angel
insofar as it was white and emitted light.
The papers scattered everywhere–the contents of a hundred over-
turned filing cabinets–lay untroubled on the pavement,
though it was clear to her what was written down
was terrible. What’s scribbled in the body.
For the worst was inside her right side.
Nothing ever came again to warn her.
Those last two lines are doing a lot of work in this poem. They suggest that this dream is a vision of the child’s death, and that the cause will be due to a physical problem in the right side of her body (I’m thinking cancer, but it could be something else). And the drama implied is not simply shoehorned in at the end: the fact that the car is on its side and is described as meeting the criteria needed to be an angel suggests death before we get to the more straightforwardly ominous “terrible” writing on the scattered sheets of paper. There is a personal history of forthcoming tragedy behind this poem that makes up the larger context, which ultimately is left closed by the poet. We get one symbolic dream which is spun into a ten-line cautionary tale by the speaker, and it is more than enough to make us want to fill in the blanks of this girl’s life.
Most of my favorite poems from As for Dream have to do with imagery of the body, like these:
“Sorrow in the Body”
Just gallons of oil.
And the polished gears and levers
can’t handle the volume coming up.
Black juice and boiled rice.
You’re going to be here
way too long.
“Weight”
You want a story? I’ll give you one.
A dangerous man is inside of me; when I
sit still for ten minutes my breath plummets
lower and lower into my body like a fishing weight
that will eventually reach the end of my spine and I will
sit up straight or fall over onto the table.
The table has a part in the story, too,
you will find out later.
We are all waiting to hear
what the hook yanked-up from down there.
In both of these poems, inner turmoil is turned into actual junk. In the first poem, the inside of the body is a coping machine that churns the oil of sorrow, and it’s when the level rises up beyond what the machine can handle that we are really in trouble. In “Weight,” the speaker’s breath becomes a hook that travels down through the murk of the body to either straighten her up or leave her prone. Hamilton openly and playfully addresses what is left out of the poem by promising that we will learn later what part the table plays in “the story,” but of course the story ends in limbo and is never returned to. It is Hamilton’s skill at employing the unsaid that makes her poems so captivating.