Corridor

"Hamilton is able to sustain a complex narrative through stripped-down poems . . . leavened by a wry humor." --The New York Times Book Review



I wanted to read an essay in your wrist.

The afternoon seemed endless. Out the window,

a lane to the right was bending away,

taking with it the figure moving down it.

Alone for a quarter of an hour,

looking in, plotting the argument,

all the marks of lucidity

and brevity in that attempt,

that benefit of rhetoric:

the true but unlikely moment.

--from "Summered"

Corridor, Saskia Hamilton's third collection, is a study of motion and time. Its glanced landscapes, its lives seen in passing, render the immeasurable in broken narratives. These poems are succinct in order to travel quickly--they have unexpected distances within their reach. They are dauntless and alert in their apprehension of the natural kingdom at the frontier of so many unnatural ones. And they inhabit the realm of contemplation which, for Hamilton, is charged with eros.