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

between the two interesting, almost flavorful words “weathered” and “tilt,” one governing surface, the other angle. (I’m reminded of an astonishing Egon Schiele painting Four Trees , each one a distinct, spindly personality.) It’s no surprise to have them brought out at the end in the personal, matey, borderline slang of “old lunatics” (a tone, by the way, of which Hamilton had an absolute mastery, as witness his essayistic prose, or a couple of broader poems, “Larkinesque” and the lit. crit. skit called “An Alternative Agenda”). The impersonal Pevsnerish handling of time in “weathered” has morphed into the simple personal of “old.” (“We are all old-timers,” says Lowell in “Waking in the Blue,” a poem Hamilton will have known and, I believe, liked.) That tone—distinctly warmer, more spoken, more intimately joshing than anything else in the poem—prepares us for its last word, “here.” There is a conflict, as there often is in Hamilton (and I struggled with it before, with my likenesses of photographs and sculptures), between movement and stasis: this is one shot, one frame, but with a zoom. It is the zoom that gives the poem its fear (oddly coincident with its warmth): the fear that the “you” will never leave “here”—that “here” that was once “out of bounds”; that the tenderness of a chance, meaningless occupation (“kneel” of course has something erotic about it) will turn out to have been ill omened or predictive; that the interest evinced will have become excessive and fateful; that ultimately we are attending at something symptomatic and morbid, for which there are hurtful colloquial designations, like “old lunatics.” The poem is graced by all sorts of other details and symmetries: its two dynamic verbs, “tilt” and “kneel”; the way the sound of “tilt” seeds “obliterated” and that of “Victorian” “lunatics”; the play of “Deciphering”—to do with revealing figures—and “obliterated,” which is destroying letters; the sinister implication of having five lines about four stones. Then “Memorial” starts to recede. It becomes what the art critics call a “ mise en abîme ” dramatizing the theme of attention (“the natural prayer of the soul,” as Paul Celan liked to say): it is Hamilton kneeling at what has become his wife’s grave; and then it is ourselves, as it were on our knees before this “memorial.” It is, after all, a poem about reading.
    The other chief or recurring Hamilton subject is the death of his father, when he was thirteen. Here, again in its entirety, is “Birthday Poem”:
    Tight in your hands,
    Your Empire Exhibition shaving mug.
    You keep it now
    As a spittoon, its bloated doves,
    Its 1938
    Stained by the droppings of your blood.
    Tonight,
    Half-suffocated, cancerous,
    Deceived,
    You bite against its gilded china mouth
    And wait for an attack.
    This poem is strung up on one rhyme, on the letter t and a long preceding vowel: “tight … bloated … eight … tonight … suffocated … bite … wait.” A second series, this time of short- t syllables, makes itself felt alongside: “spittoon … its … its … its … attack.” There is something queasy and labored about the long syllables—especially “bloated”—and then the short, pedantic cymbal stroke of the t : it demands the careful British dental t , not the drawled American half d . The t is the frontier, it enacts the spit, between one “mouth” and the other, one “mug” and the other. The poem is in iambs throughout, but with striking and dramatic trochaic inversions at the beginning (“Tight in”) and halfway (“Stained