Read Online Where Have You Been? by Michael Hofmann - Free Book Online

difficulties of being a poet (or “man of letters”), so Ian’s poems are an education in poetry. Reading them trains and civilizes one’s nerves. Just as in his tastes he whittled and whittled away, “allowing” finally maybe only Hardy and Arnold and Frost and Larkin and some early Pound and Keith Douglas and half a dozen pieces from Life Studies , so the poems do away with luxuriance, the inessential. No filler, only killer. If you take them to your heart, you will understand how much poetry is to do with the mastery of hot and cold, of precisely heart and heartlessness: the control of side effects—semicolons, line breaks, syllables, changes of register, hurdles, internal rhymes—within its own silent and impossible speech. As his poem “Nature” has it, “counting syllables / In perfect scenery, now that you’re gone.”
    All of Hamilton’s poems are moments of equilibrium in dramatic or even fraught contexts. Sometimes the contexts can be made out, or they are revealed in the notes (though neither notes nor poems are indiscreet): they are a father’s death, or a wife’s derangement. Sometimes they remain mysterious, though just as urgent. Their tragedy is expressed in the absolute separation of the pronouns in these “I-you” poems: the helpless “I,” the afflicted “you,” the fictive “we.” “The usual curse” it says in “Ties”: “His, yours, theirs, everyone’s. And hers.” The poems stop and turn; there is something pivotal and sculptural about them, but also something instantaneous—almost the best comparison is with Bill Brandt’s statuesquely tubular black-and-white sixties nude photographs (with the addition, in Hamilton, of occasional little spots of color) (“Trucks”):
    Aching, you turn back
    From the wall and your hands reach out
    Over me. They are caught
    In the last beam and, pale,
    They fly there now. You’re taking off, you say,
    And won’t be back.
    It is so vivid, it is almost theatrically or mythologically present, this shaped snapshot. Each scene has something of beacon or semaphor: built up from the short words and artful repetitions of Frost, the contracted verbs (often, as in Larkin, couched in the negative), and the teetering piles of adjectives (the triads borrowed from Lowell) or else Hamilton’s personal trademark adverb-plus-adjective pairing: “monotonously warm,” “this shocked and slightly aromatic fall of leaves,” “one hand in yours, the other / Murderously cold,” “the delicately shrouded heart / Of this white rose,” “semi-swamps / Of glitteringly drenched green,” “The river weeds / […] A shade more featherishly purple,” for buddleia or rosebay willowherb. (These extraordinarily effective, really rather glamorous adverbs aside, Hamilton’s poems have a modest and restricted vocabulary: it’s hard to imagine him doing anything as officious and showy as naming plants.)
    The opening poem—not so in The Visit but from Fifty Poems on—is “Memorial”:
    Four weathered gravestones tilt against the wall
    Of your Victorian asylum.
    Out of bounds, you kneel in the long grass
    Deciphering obliterated names:
    Old lunatics who died here.
    That’s the whole thing, a miracle of balance and implication. The “you” is addressed, I take it, to Gisela Dietzel, Hamilton’s first wife, who became schizophrenic. There are two word groups, one subtly expressing (Pound’s word!) long standing—“weathered,” “Victorian,” “long,” “obliterated,” “old,” even, at a pinch, “tilt”—and the other, dementia—“asylum,” “lunatics,” and, arguably, “tilt” again, and “out of bounds.” The stones are characterful from the beginning, like British teeth, pitched