As for Dream: Poems - Softcover

Hamilton, Saskia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555973167 ISBN 13: 9781555973162

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 2001

Synopsis

A series of brief, haunting lyrics and prose fragments, the poems in As for Dream hover in suspension between states of consciousness or being. Hamilton's verse both illustrates and investigates the human experience at many different intervals: as we wake from the dream world, as we meet the loss or disruption of our desires, as we tend to the ill, and as we die. Once we cross those boundaries, does the self remain intact? These poems record and question moments when we slip from the casing of the body and the social world and try to make our way back, or find we cannot.

About this title

About the Author

Poetry and prose by Saskia Hamilton has appeared in the Threepenny Review, Kenyon Review, McSweeney's Quarterly, and Colorado Review, among other journals. She is also the recipient of a Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Review

“[We find] ardent and articulate perceptions in these original poems of love in extremis. We are taken, figuratively and literally, by storm.” ―Forrest Gander

“Hamilton is not a quiet poet, just an extremely subtle and fierce one. There is a quality of spiritual stubborness and astonishing resilience that courses through even her briefest utterances as, with grace and technical ease, she breaches the chasms that appear to divide 'experimental' poetics, classical fragments, Romantic aphoristic debris, and Oriental glimpsing of the ineffable.” ―Jorie Graham

“Finding the space where the terse confessional poem interacts with the open-ended fragment, Hamilton's debut sews together the separate worlds of id and epistemology, of sexual disillusion and fetishized cognitive oddity . . . Visible precedents [for these poems are] Anne Carson ('We are all waiting to hear / what the hook yanked-up from down there') and, in the prose poems, Robert Hass (who is thanked).” ―Publishers Weekly

“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 . . . 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. [This book is] a luminous exploration of the ambit where dream, memory, imagination, and longing pass into and through one another.” ―Kirkus Reviews

Edition details

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1555973167
• ISBN 13: 9781555973162
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 80