Lucy Hamilton - Böcker

The insidious peril that haunts these pages appears in various guises against a backdrop of France, Germany, Greece, the USA and the UK. Stalker is a collection of prose poems in which the narrator attempts to make sense of everyday experience, turning to Rilke, Van Gogh, Steinbeck and others in her quest for understanding.

"There is nobody writing prose poetry in any way close to Lucy Hamilton's. Of Heads & Hearts is an intricate and rich collection that riffs on the interconnectedness of human relationships with the deft movements of a musical score. Here is a poet writing at the height of her talent using precise and controlled language to build toward a cumulative collage of characters, threads and associations all in conversation with one another. Of Heads & Hearts becomes more and more rewarding with each re-reading, most notably the utter ache at the heart of the `Requiem for the Engineer' sequence." -Kaddy Benyon"With each new story, this collection extends its reach and increases its hold on the reader. The work of the poet here is not to claim authority over a series of elusive moments but to curate their collection. Eclectic, absorbing, tender and funny, the poems testify to the mind's restlessness and its inventive responses to the world." -Lucy Sheerman

"When I approach experimental poetry, particularly when it's related to images - the ekphrastic relationship - I ask myself, does it work? By that I mean, does it carry off the symbiotic closeness, does it make me feel there's a strong reason why the two art forms feed off each other? In the case of Lucy Hamilton's 'Viewer / Viewed', the answer is a resounding Yes. First, the images: photomontages of close family members are transposed with each other, making one instead of two separate photos. The photomontage method is in a tradition pioneered by the German photo-montage artist Hannah Hoech (1889-1978) and later by the contemporary British conceptual artist John Stezaker's Marriage (Film Portrait Collage) series, though Hamilton's are not so surreal. Her photomontages led her, after a fallow period, to begin writing poems. "The tug of juxtaposition": the inspiration for the creation of image and poem in this work, enabling her to resurrect memories of those she has grown up with and loved, the places she has travelled to, the objects holding significant meaning for her. The poems are composed in couplets and consist of thought and image units, decisions of what to juxtapose, quotations, and pauses separated by vertical lines or lines that begin with capital letters. The beauty of this process - for this work is, among other things, an illustration of a poetic process - results in the poems' extraordinary accessibility and clarity. The back-and-forthness of image and poem, each illuminating the other, is exactly what a successful ekphrastic relationship should display, and what makes this collection ultimately so original and rewarding.