All Souls by Saskia Hamilton

In All Souls, Saskia Hamilton transforms compassion, fear, expectation, and
memory into art of the highest order. Judgment is suspended as the poems
and lyric fragments make an inventory of truths that carry us through night's
reckoning with mortal hope into daylight. But even daylight - with its
escapements and unbreakable numbers, restless, / irregular light and shadow,
awakened" - can't appease the crisis of survival at the heart of this collection.
Marked with a new openness and freedom - anew way of saying that is itself a
study of what can and can't be said - the poems give way to Hamilton's mind,
and her unerring descriptions of everyday life: "the asphalt velvety in the rain."
The central suite of poems vibrates with a ghostly radioactive attentiveness,
with care unbounded by time or space. Its impossible charge is to
acknowledge and ease suffering with a gaze that both widens and narrows its
aperture. Lightly told, told without sentimentality, the story is devastating. A
mother prepares to take leave of a young son. Impossible departure. "A
disturbance within the order of moments." One that can't be stopped, though
in these poems language does arrest and insome essential ways fix time.
Tenderness, courage, refusal, and acceptance infuse this work, illuminating
what Elizabeth Hardwick called "the universal unsealed wound of existence.

Saskia Hamiltonis the author of several books of poetry, including Corridor,
named one of the best poetry books of 2014 by The New Yorker and The
New York Times Book Review . She is the editor of The Letters of Robert
Lowell and coeditor of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between
Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell . She teaches at Barnard College.

Graywolf Press
On Sale: Oct 3/23
6 x 9 • 72 pages
9781644452639 • $23.00 • pb
Poetry / General