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Illustration by Na Kim.
We at the Review are mourning the loss of our friend and advisory editor, the poet and scholar Saskia Hamilton. We recently published her poem “Faring,” part of her collection All Souls, which will be published by Graywolf Press in October; we want to share it again now, along with an introduction by Claudia Rankine. Hamilton will be dearly missed. (June 7, 2023)
To read Saskia Hamilton’s “Faring,” the opening poem in her forthcoming collection, All Souls, is to move through time in acts of seeing and of noting what is seen. The morning ticks along as light enters to illuminate both the surrounding structure, window ledge, doves—and the sounds that seep in, wind, construction. To track the light, as the season moves into longer days, is to follow the shadows of others moving here and there behind curtains across the way. The cyclical nature of dawn’s return creates illusions of certainty for future days, though the speaker in “Faring” lives within an illness that names death its cure. This does not prevent love’s negotiation with time, as a child withholds declarations of love in fear of time’s retaliatory embrace. For now, the day seems to say, Let the ordinary amaze, it’s the grace we hold.
“Faring” builds its rooms against the too-muchness of life, life’s actual, red-hot intensities, for fear that even the caring inquiry “How are you faring?” will no longer be a relevant question, or that the tracking of the gray morning sunrise will be the only relevant answer.
Like the eighteenth-century abolitionist poet William Cowper, who is called forward in “Faring” by his poem—the book open, perhaps, on the speaker’s bedside table, like table talk—Hamilton rests her sights on what can be apprehended from a bed, sofa, chair, or window, and named in the quotidian. These small recognitions ensure a life’s weightiness, wariness, worthiness. Three centuries after Cowper, it’s not the countryside but the cityscape that allows Hamilton access to her own inner landscape.
The brilliance of “Faring,” as well as its task, resides in its narrative charting of daily moments lived as “a soothing down.”
—Claudia Rankine
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