However hard I tried, I couldn’t make Saskia Hamilton’s first book, As For Dream, matter much to me. The poems insisted on an atmosphere of reverence and solemnity they couldn’t fill with content: it was like chamber music without the music. And so when I opened her new book to discover the same eency-weency, haiku-like, white-space poems, I thought, “Are we really going to do this again?”

We are really going to do this again, and Hamilton’s tenacity makes me doubt my old impressions. Divide These is superb. The atmospheres and stage-sets of Confessional poetry are here (deathbeds, love letters), as is the suggestion, from poem to poem, of abstracted Confessional narrative. Poems at the beginning of the book describe the sensation of beginning; those at the end describe the experience of ending, settling, becoming still; and those in the middle function as tonal analyses of being in-between (several of these are set on a boat in a canal). But unlike the speakers in normative confessional poems (think of Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” or Lowell’s “Skunk Hour”), whose disclosures are often explicitly theatrical, Hamilton’s speakers (if that is what to call the strange almost-voices that not-quite-say her poems) seem actually dismayed by being heard or overheard or whatever it is we readers in fact do or half-do to them. I’ve made the above statements deliberately tentative: so carefully and incrementally calibrated are these poems, that statements feel somehow coarse in their company.

As is the case with most poets worth taking seriously, people exist in Hamilton’s poems, and they exist to have things happen to them: they die, fall in love, quarrel; debris falls on them from above, and smoke fills up the elevator shaft (several poems here suggest 9/11); we are told that they chat idly (“of old cooks and dogs”) and “bicker” and “pray.” But like Stevens, Hamilton despises the conventions of represented immediacy: to have someone up and speak in a poem seems unnatural to her. The plain reality of being alive is mediation: language, gesture, thought, all of it adds texture to the world it otherwise wouldn’t have, and sometimes it obscures the world. When Hamilton writes about people and events, she leaves these layers of mediation intact. Her poems can seem therefore blurry or distanced, and not only when they describe the view from an airplane window:

Seventy lakes below.

The snow.

Houses at the edges.

—From Not Known

Plenty of poets of my generation share Hamilton’s distaste for stagey immediacy, and they’ve crafted a period style to express those distastes. But Hamilton’s poems share virtually nothing with the poems of the period style: there’s no collage, no frenetic signifiers, no chain gang whimsy, and the thinker she seems most interested in is, of all people, Freud. What strikes me as crucial about Hamilton is her refusal to buy wholesale either the clichés of putting people in her poems or the clichés of keeping them out. It makes for a lonely poetry of tentative, wrong-end-of-the-telescope impressions: but it’s an authentic idiom, and it’s Hamilton’s alone.

— Dan Chiasson