Ossabaw: (Salt Modern Poets)

Believing in invention as the art of finding things, David Hamilton has been concerned with finding what, in memory, in nature, in his reading, and in daily events, suggests a poem. Some of the results are “found poems” in the strict sense, as he samples and refashions existing texts; other poems in this remarkable book could be said to be found in the extended sense of being discovered in memory or by observation. Comprising free verse lyrics as well as poems in recognizable forms, Hamilton demonstrates an extraordinary range, including a series of upside down sonnets, “upsodounnets” as Chaucer might have said. The long title poem carries finding to an extreme as Hamilton condenses journal entries to a collage of lyrical notes. Observation of nature is a primary subject, but not far behind comes material from daily life and the world of art – from paintings and from other texts, both early and recent.

Table of Contents:
Contents Acknowledgments Lovesong from the Marshes For Rebecca To a Later Autumn “Go, Little Book” Poem Ending with Lines from an Obscure Memoir Gaudy Fox Our Oldest Oath Not at All Byzantine “The Edge Is What I Have” Festival After Lagamon Slender Batons The Ballad of Bender Sutton His Armory Show, Nights of 1958 Van Gogh Dropped After Claes Oldenburg Homage to Alfred Montgomery, Corn Painter On the Last Days of Fast Time Neither Venice Nor Belmont Fable Charlie Asked Before the Jugs in Soaked Burlap, Before the Water Flagging for Alfatox in a Middle Field Kindnesses Noctua Many Moons Marginalia Found in a Secondhand Catullus Wulf and Eadwacer From the Old English Riddles Coda Serranilla of Aranjuéz The Arab-Andalucian Lover and His Love Ossabaw Dust The Blue He Seized Looking for Mother Ciao Half Music, Half Murmur Popular Song for a Popular Season Twenty Ways To Say Snow Serranilla of Barranquilla Like Smoke Beige and Avocado What You Can Get Away With Too Trillium Oriole Blinded Papaver From a Journal The Secret Lives of Trees Foucault Would Have Said After Maillol Bound Each to Each Anasazi Baskets On Never Ending with . . . Poison, a partially found poem An American Suite For Coyote, Song and Lament The Collector Haiku Composed During a Lecture

About the Author :
David Hamilton edits The Iowa Review and teaches English literature at the University of Iowa. With degrees from Amherst College (AB) and the University of Virginia (PhD), he taught in Colombia and at the University of Michigan before taking his present position. The University of Missouri Press published his Deep River (2001), a memoir embedded in local history reaching far into the archaeological record. In 1992, he was a Fulbright Professor in Valencia, Spain.

Review :
Hamilton never practises self-absorption, let alone self-aggrandizement. A consistent philosophical stance emerges, wherein what is outside the self, what is Nature, is given precedence. He has still another side, though: a playful and oblique poet who will not refuse found poems. A deeper indicator of Hamilton’s complex sensibility is his simultaneous interest in Old English poetry and Gertrude Stein. Whether the poet is grappling with love (or the loss of love), a friend’s urge to die, man’s very slight place in nature. “impermanence” (as he puts it), or the paradoxes of our unique tool for comprehending the world, language, he emphasizes the unanswerable questions that face us all.