POETRY IN REVIEW

Abstract

1 6 7 R P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W G E O R G E B R A D L E Y Poets are fond of dreaming about the attentions of posterity, but it is the rare author whose work reaches a wider audience after he or she is no longer around to promote it. Even so, posthumous recognition happens just often enough that there exists the cliché of neglected genius persevering in obscurity and exists also the category of the recluse poet. Emily Dickinson is the most famous example – a brilliant mind working privately to produce poems that seem ever more significant with the passage of time – but there are others. William Blake, Herman Melville, Frederick Goddard Tuckerman . . . poets major and minor who retreated from the world (or from whom the world retreated) yet nonetheless achieved enough to eventually gain recognition. We have another now: the recluse poet of Montclair, New Jersey, Alfred Starr Hamilton. Hamilton lived to the age of ninety-one, but his long life added A D a r k D r e a m b o x o f A n o t h e r K i n d : T h e P o e m s o f A l f r e d S t a r r H a m i l t o n , by Alfred Starr Hamilton (Song Cave, 232 pp., $18.95 paper) O n t h e S t r e e t o f D i v i n e L o v e : N e w a n d S e l e c t e d P o e m s , by Barbara Hamby (University of Pittsburgh Press, 144 pp., $16.95 paper) 1 6 8 B R A D L E Y Y up to a marginal existence. Born in 1914, he tramped for a time as a young man (‘‘a hitchhiker through 43 states on no money at all’’); he went door to door in the Great Depression working as a Fuller Brush salesman; and he did an unhappy stint in the army during World War II. Mostly, though, he kept to himself, passing roughly half his days in a suburban boardinghouse, looking out the window and writing poems. He published little – a scattering of magazine appearances, a couple of chapbooks, one volume from a small press – and we have his work in publication now only because a few of the very few readers who encountered his verse in the 1970s were su≈ciently impressed to suggest it to the editors of another small press four decades later. In sum, Hamilton’s art is about as outside as outsider art gets. That in itself does not make his poetry any better or worse, but just as with Dickinson, Hamilton ’s peripheral status explains some of his strangeness, and it o√ers a first step to our understanding. As goes almost without saying, Alfred Starr Hamilton is not a poet on the order of Emily Dickinson. Still, he is of the same breed. He is a poet who has observed his narrow circumstances intently and at length and has arrived at a heightened version of the mundane. Like Dickinson, he enjoys puzzling his readers, so that some of his poems take the form of riddles. Like Dickinson, he writes poems that would be impossible to paraphrase. And like Dickinson he makes his verse out of a few ordinary things – a sunset, a star, a thunderstorm, a butterfly, a bird – items so commonplace they would hardly deserve comment were they not seen with Hamilton’s gently visionary eye. Tomorrow night I walked to a dark black star That I can have uncovered the face of the moon Today and tonight I walked to a seventh noon star in heaven That I opened the face of heaven, that I counted the dark chimes I walked along the pathway of a black butterfly I entered the forest of dark bewilderment Either the other half of the black star that blinds the moon Was lifted to the moon on either wing of noon butterfly...