David Hamilton revitalises American pastoral writing with an uncanny ability to conjure memories of childhood and moments of spiritual and physical encounter. His gift lies in combining these themes of discovery with a lyrical intelligence never far from natural speech, all delivered with sensitivity for people, place and natural beauty.

ContentsAcknowledgmentsLovesong from the MarshesFor RebeccaTo a Later Autumn“Go, Little Book”Poem Ending with Lines from an Obscure MemoirGaudy FoxOur Oldest OathNot at All Byzantine“The Edge Is What I Have”FestivalAfter LagamonSlender BatonsThe Ballad of Bender SuttonHis Armory Show, Nights of 1958Van Gogh DroppedAfter Claes OldenburgHomage to Alfred Montgomery, Corn PainterOn the Last Days of Fast TimeNeither Venice Nor BelmontFableCharlie AskedBefore the Jugs in Soaked Burlap, Before the WaterFlagging for Alfatox in a Middle FieldKindnessesNoctuaMany MoonsMarginalia Found in a Secondhand CatullusWulf and EadwacerFrom the Old English RiddlesCodaSerranilla of AranjuézThe Arab-Andalucian Lover and His LoveOssabawDustThe Blue He SeizedLooking for MotherCiaoHalf Music, Half MurmurPopular Song for a Popular SeasonTwenty Ways To Say SnowSerranilla of BarranquillaLike SmokeBeige and AvocadoWhat You Can Get Away WithToo TrilliumOrioleBlindedPapaverFrom a JournalThe Secret Lives of TreesFoucault Would Have SaidAfter MaillolBound Each to EachAnasazi BasketsOn Never Ending with . . .Poison, a partially found poemAn American SuiteFor Coyote, Song and LamentThe CollectorHaiku Composed During a Lecture

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.

The abiding accomplishment of these poems is how they lend a voice to nature, Hamilton’s most common subject. With his fluid line and graceful imagery, he creates poems that seem discovered more than written. This is among the most difficult achievements, to extend consciousness into the world without trampling what it touches. His work is transformative in the best sense, in that it deepens how we see and what we feel. I very much enjoyed encountering this mind.

The abiding accomplishment of these poems is how they lend a voice to nature, Hamilton's most common subject. With his fluid line and graceful imagery, he creates poems that seem discovered more than written. This is among the most difficult achievements, to extend consciousness into the world without trampling what it touches. His work is transformative in the best sense, in that it deepens how we see and what we feel. I very much enjoyed encountering this mind. -- Bob Hicok The poetic debut - at long last! - by an esteemed editor and memoirist, David Hamilton's Ossabaw is a tapestry of impressions and insights, music and ideas. From translations of Anglo-Saxon riddles to blank verse lyrics, narratives, prose poetry, and found poems, this poet reveals at every turn an eye for details from the natural world, wit, and wisdom. 'One motive for turning up next spring,' Hamilton writes, 'is to see how far these poppies spread.' This book is lined with such motives, such graceful discoveries. -- Christopher Merrill With their subtle craft and quiet acuity, David Hamilton's poems are astonishingly varied. He is at home with paintings, Gertrude Stein, landscape, Catullus, haiku, Old English literature, and the personal world of memory. Most vivid for me are his poems about the natural world - whose "horizon sweeps wide", whose ground "tugs" at your feet - poems whose fluent lines offer up the moment in its own fluidity, with images as sharply observed as the thin-bladed hoe he remembers weeding with. -- Margaret Gibson David Hamilton's Ossabaw offers us poems of profound intimacy and formal elegance. These finely made poems, forged from and by a riveting intelligence and a luminous heart, illuminate the lyric moment with a vision at once precise and generous. In these intricately calibrated poems, the past? always present, always fugitive? is drawn up like cold, dark water from a well and in it one sees and reads the riddle of memory, the riddle of the mercurial self. -- Eric Pankey

Strikingly beautiful pastoral poetry from the American Midwest in this debut collection by David Hamilton.Long-standing editor of The Iowa Review, Hamilton is also an extremely gifted teacher as well as being the author of the bestselling memoir, Deep River.Dealing with childhood experience and adolescent encounter alike, Hamilton combines natural speech with a striking lyric ear to create spiritual responses to the natural world.

The Secret Lives of TreesShe's much too much,that dogwood, liftingher slip on lightlywooded hillsidesthen finding her cheeksmultitudes of cheekscome scarlet, come fall.Only our pronounscompromise her.She may not be sheat all. Orthe attenuationof her early blossomconveys anotherstory. Pale,they are,mausoleumpale, curlingfrom dulled purplecenters, preparingto drift like grandmothersfrom wicker rockerson long porches.And the leaves, the latescarlet leaves,are an old woman's memories,tensing to touchthe patriarch oak to fire.