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Tag Archives: Ian Hamilton

“Your Place” by Ian Hamilton

29 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ Comments Off on “Your Place” by Ian Hamilton

Tags

Ian Hamilton, Poem, Poet, poetry, Your Place

Lamp and Window

The main street burns. It’s two blocks to your place.
There are girls everywhere and the one I’m looking at
Might. She holds my stare a second, then, compassionate,
She lets it go. And I can hardly see her face
For people. Yet when, like a great slow fish, she turns
Into the tide, baring her teeth at me, I look down
At the hot stone crumbling under my feet, at the brown
Dust there. She moves on. The main street burns.
It’s two blocks to your place. There are girls everywhere.

__________

“Your Place” by Ian Hamilton. This previously unpublished poem can be found along with the rest of Hamilton’s work in Ian Hamilton: Collected Poems.

The picture: taken in Houston, Texas.

Ian Hamilton

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“Friends” by Ian Hamilton

22 Sunday Jun 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Friends, Ian Hamilton, John Etheridge, Poem, Poet, poetry, Writing

Cat in the Window

‘At one time we wanted nothing more
Than to wake up in each other’s arms.’
Old enemy,
You want to live forever
And I don’t
Was the last pact we made
On our last afternoon together.

__________

“Friends” by Ian Hamilton.

I have to thank my friend John Etheridge for sending me along Hamilton’s way, and for writing poetry that’s certainly worth exploring.

The above photo: taken in my backyard in Houston, Texas.

More from Hamilton: Biography, Epitaph, In Dreams

Ian Hamilton

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“Epitaph” by Ian Hamilton

06 Tuesday Aug 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Auden, Epitaph, Ian Hamilton, John Etheridge, Larkin, Philip Larkin, Poem, poetry, The Book of Pain, W.H. Auden, Writing

Ian Hamilton

The scent of old roses and tobacco
Takes me back.
It’s almost twenty years
Since I last saw you
And our half-hearted love affair goes on.

You left me this:
A hand, half-open, motionless
On a green counterpane.
Enough to build
A few melancholy poems on.

If I had touched you then
One of us might have survived.

__________

“Epitaph” by Ian Hamilton, which you’ll find in his excellent Ian Hamilton Collected Poems.

For a fine elucidation of this poem, I refer you to my friend John Etheridge’s blog The Book of Pain. His site is a useful resource for compelling, voiced poetry. It’s title — The Book of Pain — suggests the sort of revealing, forbidding tone that’s also made vivid in Clive James’s great collection The Book of My Enemy.

John calls Hamilton the “finest poet of the second half of the 20th century”; and while I disagree, I don’t dismiss the gauge of such a careful register of language. For the record I think Eliot is the best post-war poet, with Larkin and Auden tied for second.

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“In Dreams” by Ian Hamilton

27 Saturday Jul 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Ian Hamilton, In Dreams, John Etheridge, Poem, poetry, The Book of Pain

NPG x35720; Ian Hamilton by Mark GersonTo live like this:
One hand in yours, the other
Murderously cold; one eye
Pretending to watch over you,
The other blind.
We live in dreams:
These sentimental afternoons,
These silent vows,
How we would starve without them.

__________

“In Dreams” by Ian Hamilton, which you’ll find among his consistently excellent Collected Poems.

The link above takes you to John Etheridge’s The Book of Pain, a site which catalogs his writing and some of the work which influences it. John’s writing is very intricate and careful and readable: it’s one of the few such sites I check consistently.

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Who Turned the Page?

17 Friday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Personal, Poetry

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Bible, Biography, College, Emile Zola, Genesis, Gore Vidal, graduation, Ian Hamilton, Old Testament, Poem, poetry, The City and the Pillar, university

Seagull in Ireland

Who turned the page? When I went out
Last night, his Life was left wide-open,
Half-way through, in lamplight on my desk:
The Middle years.
Now look at him. Who turned the page?

__________

Biography by Ian Hamilton.

As the penultimate line suggests, Hamilton seems to have written this cryptic lament for a certain stage of life — his “middle years”. But I read it now and reflect with great melancholy on the passage of a different period: the first year of post-college life. I graduated from the University of Virginia 365 days ago, and although I just recognized today as that anniversary, “Biography” careened into my consciousness early this morning and has been rattling around the back of my mind all day.

My friend D. sometimes recalls aloud — just as I repeat back to him — the epigraph of Gore Vidal’s great novel about youth and loss, The City and the Pillar.  It is the 26th verse of Genesis 19: “But his wife looked back from behind him and she became a pillar of salt.” This is a reference to the flight made by Abraham, Sarah, Lot, and Lot’s wife from the city of Sodom, which God is said to have smote as he commanded the four to flee without glancing back. Lot’s wife turned to look, and she was frozen mid-flight. She became the pillar.

In his novel, Vidal used this image as an allegory for the idleness and destructiveness of longing for things that cannot be regained. My friend D. usually caps this reference by saying, with quiet assurance, “You can never look back. You can never look back.” (He embodies this mantra so completely that he refuses to revisit our old college town and old college friends, despite living only two hours away.)

And maybe he’s right. I like to defiantly repeat Emile Zola’s stoic incitement, “Allons travailler!” (“Get on with it!”), but in quieter moments, I’m more often staring out the window and whispering (with equal parts disbelief, amusement, and melancholy), Who turned the page?

The picture was taken in County Kerry, Ireland.

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