Turned in just months before her death last year, All Souls (Corsair, £10.99) is the fourth collection by American poet, Saskia Hamilton. Made up of four poems each comprised of short sections that sometimes seem to reach for each other, picking up images and phrases many pages on, the book is beautifully orchestrated.
Covering much historical ground, the poems apply a wakeful attention to the project of understanding how we feel and how we express that feeling in art, literature and human relationships. The poems range through time spans, art forms and personalities, making for those closest to her, (the child mentioned frequently here), a kind of future company to set against the loneliness of being left behind. In these last poems illness frames, spurs and synthesises.
In Exits and Entrances to the Auditorium, the words “breath” or “breathing” pulse throughout the sequence. It’s delicately done so when one section concludes with the injunction, “Take a deep breath. They will run out”, the starkness of the statement comes as a shock.
Time is tricky in these poems, constantly upending and revising itself. “Late in the season, eating a pear / that is the memory of a pear,” begins one section; “Light before you call it light graying the sky”, (Faring) begins the book. The description throughout is precise and minute, and the collection fashions the sum of its sections and preoccupations into a whole that is unflinchingly gutsy as well as wrenchingly tend.
