The Gate of Play

In reading Joseph Hamel's poetry, you begin a walk down a familiar street and end up taking a turn you never have before or through a forest path that you thought you knew but now everything looks more marvelous and more frightful. And you take this walk with someone you care about; and you take this walk with yourself. A beautiful world surrounds with a "blue river" and "falling dark," with the "first alarm of autumn" and "spiders' webs" so full of grief and joy that these poems stun you with their love of being alive, and greet you on a "broken street" and dare to reveal heart and spine in an all too human voice knowing there is no arrival and departure, just the time we're on the road with each other and with ourselves. These poems revel in the "metal pail sound of a milk chute" or "fire inside the frost," at the same time that they seek a solitude so wonderful because it hurts. These poems confide to each other like the constant travelers in the novels of Thomas Bernhard, who carefully shape their words as they try to say the most heartfelt things a human can bear. These poems rise out of deep furrows cut by the words of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost and seek to carry us into light no matter how heavy our burden.

-John R. Harvey, playwright and poet, author of Rot and Night of the Giant