A Map of the Heavens: Selected Poems, 1975–2017 by Janet Hamill

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Map of the Heavens: Selected Poems, 1975–2017 by Janet Hamill Jane Rosenberg LaForge (bio) a map of the heavens: selected poems, 1975–2017 Janet Hamill Spuyten Duyvil http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/a-map-of-the-heavens.html 213 pages; Print, $18.00 Of all the nostalgias for the before times—before the pandemic, the internet, even before MTV and the Reagan Revolution—the art and musical movements born out of the 1970s downtown New York scene are among the most potent. The late Keith Haring’s works are ubiquitous on greeting cards and billboards. David Byrne of the Talking Heads, which rose to prominence during the golden age of New York City nightlife, performs now on Broadway as an elder statesman of rock ’n’ roll. Patti Smith, poet, performer, songwriter, and winner of a National Book Award for her memoir, is regarded as a national treasure. The poet Janet Hamill witnessed the birth and nurturing of these scene-makers and their styles, particularly the ascent of Smith, her friend since college. (They once stayed up past midnight to hear the first FM radio broadcast of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a night Smith documented in an introduction to All the Songs: [End Page 135] The Story Behind Every Beatles Release.) But Hamill did not use the fame of her friends, nor her proximity to it, to ingratiate herself. Nor did she remain on the sidelines; she painted, took photographs, and wrote eight books of poetry and fiction, work that has been recognized by Publishers Weekly and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award. In her latest collection, A Map of the Heavens: Selected Poems, 1975–2017, Hamill documents her navigation of the multiple worlds she inhabits with nostalgia and innocence. It’s a combination that could overwhelm a lesser poet, but one Hamill rides to spectacular effect. Smith’s remembrance of that fateful night she and Hamill shared tags Hamill as the more innocent of the two; she was the Beatles fan, while Smith favored the harder-edged Rolling Stones. A preference for the Beatles does not foretell a career in poetry, but Hamill has maintained a stance of wonderment before her subjects. “I run my hand across your chest / It comes away with diamond dust / destined to be scattered / wide among the stars when we die / returning to our source in the sky” is how Hamill concludes her poem “Aria.” The poem is not only an earnest and instructive attempt to capture a particular moment in the vastness of cosmological time, but it also describes Hamill’s relationship to the words and work of poetry. Celestial bodies are frequently used in her poems, which speaks to the type of innocence and nostalgia that suffuses these works. For stargazing is a journey into the past; the stars we perceive today are the record of light from hundreds of thousands of years earlier. This fact continues to startle Hamill. Rather than whitewash social problems of another, “better” era, her nostalgia celebrates moments of individual emotional clarity. Hamill has been called a trance poet, a surrealist and science fiction writer, and a post-Beat curator, or inheritor, of the original tradition. She is name-checked with the likes of Anselm Hollo and Tom Disch. In this volume, Hamill reveals herself as a poetic polymath, exploding the restraints of one aesthetic to plumb the freedoms of another. She began her career, as it’s depicted in this volume, as a romantic, though not necessarily with a capital “R.” Her earliest verses are centered in locations and situations exotic yet familiar. The dusty Third World village, alternately luxurious, or hellish hotel rooms; a transporting view of the ocean or from the top of a mountain; the doubt that rises and falls within the artist contemplating where she belongs: [End Page 136] these works conjure youthful expeditions to foreign soils in search of the self, the auditioning of potentially annihilating ideas, and the discovery of sensuality in the ordinary. A comparison of two poems from relatively early in her oeuvre reveals how Hamill progressed from a poet seeking authenticity in the usual settings...