Lexicography
Carol Hamilton
Translator's Note
"Si se dexo algo en el tintero"
Sancho's body, thoroughly mottled
by blows from dreams tempered
with strokes of reality,
might yet, his master quoth,
have a forgotten spot, unbruised.
The translator, never content to do
what he has done before he tells me
what he is to do, has done, will do,
showering down puddles of footnotes to
dampen progress through miniscule print1
assures me I could not understand
\ldblquote Left something at the Bottom
of the Inkhorn." No doubt.
Having been informed, I protest,
for who should say I pass by
incomplete histories, partially
unwritten, without recognition.
Imperfection is a familiar enough
critique. But without that heavy hand
layering word on word,2 I should not
have experienced again the circle
of inkwell in wooden surface;
pen point placed in smooth black
holder, fat and quickly tapered;
fingers stained with favored
watery blue; point poking for
corners in round bottle to avoid
confrontation with authority,
reminders of lack of foresight,
lack of provident thoughts,
fearful scrapings for enough to
avoid disgrace.
I think one day I left it
bone dry, tinted glass, the color
of graded remarks on papers,
written in perfectly formed letters.
Yet the cynic says the tormentor
can find a spot yet to stain.
Sancho, believer in rewards
to be doled out at last,
you stagger forth again
to bare your flogged flesh.3
And we take the blame, after all:
something left undone, no doubt,
some god without tribute, some
creed unheeded, some lucky
stone untouched, or did I step out
on the left foot one day
without noticing?4
_____________________________
1 slow enough going to begin with.
2 there were enough at the outset.
3 too much or too little, in those authoritarian days when I knew I dare not err, was the same in the end.
4 Think though. The story is unfinished.
Lexicography
Carol Hamilton
March Street Press
3413 Wilshire
Greensboro NC
marchstreetpress.com
rbixby@earthlink.net
isbn 1-59661-153-7
87 pp
Adam may have named the beasts of Eden, but Carol Hamilton's Lexicography beautifully renames all of creation in these poems that delight in definitions, ideas, and the things of this solid earth. Hamilton is playful and serious, knowing that words are paths to the heart. If one early definition for a bard was \ldblquote a maker," then Hamilton in Lexicography is indeed a maker, a bard extraordinaire.
--Robert Cooperman,
Winner of the Colorado Book Award,
Author of My Shtetl.
Lexicography is another reminder that Carol Hamilton has long been one of the most under-heralded of current American poets. These poems are seamless observations of and reflections on the multi-textured way we use (and all too often are used by) language. A certain candidate in my universe for poetry book of the year!
--David Greisman,
Abbey
In Lexicography, Carol Hamilton celebrates the intricacy and joy of "naming." With consummate poetic skill and the keen and experienced eye of a naturalist, she not only perceives the mystery and beauty of the world around her but captures its very essence in concise and artfully executed language. Her subjects are as various and intriguing as her linguistic felicities. She writes of Demosthenes, the stutterer of Athens; of Grandma Moses and Jerusalem artichokes; and of Julia Child and Stand Watie, the Cherokee warrior. The major theme of the collection, however, is the power and redemptive potential of language itself; of how, through our "naming" of the things of the world, we "know" them. I unhesitatingly give this collection my highest recommendation.
--Larry D. Thomas,
Member, Texas Institute of Letters,
2008 Texas Poet Laureate
Carol Hamilton has authored 15 books: three novels for children, Polish legends, and poetry chapbooks for which she has won an Oklahoma Book Award, a Southwest Book Award, the Cherubim Award. and the Pegasus Prize. She was Poet Laureate of Oklahoma, 1995\endash 97, Poet Laureate for the 50th anniversary of Midwest City, Oklahoma and Tinker Air Force Base. She received a Chiron Review Chapbook Award, the David Ray Poetry Prize, Warren Keith Poetry Award, and received first place in both short story and poetry in the Byline Literary Awards from BYLINE MAGAZINE.
Review by Benjamin Myers
The world was once a book. Perhaps not all could read it, but the informed, by study or by revelation, could peruse its pages and gather wisdom from it. Staring into the divine light, Dante says, in the final canto of his masterpiece, “I saw within Its depth how It conceives / all things in a single volume bound by Love, / of which the universe is the scattered leaves” (Paradiso 33.85-87, trans. John Ciardi). For centuries, this sense of the world as legible was at the heart of the western intellect, infusing our art and our science with a sense of meaning and purpose. Then came Newtonian physics, with its insistence that the world is a machine, not a text. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the idea of the book of nature, Dante’s “single volume,” was replaced by the clockwork of the deists and other devotees of rationality. Now, although we know more of the world’s particulars than ever we did, we don’t know what the world is. We don’t have a metaphor as central as Dante’s book, or even Newton’s machine. We don’t have a central metaphor, that is, unless we insist upon having one, as Carol Hamilton does in her splendid and impressively coherent volume of poems, Lexicography. Through sheer poetic will, Hamilton renders the world legible once again, while, like Dante before her, acknowledging the difficulty of reading it aright.
For Hamilton words are both the world and the means by which we know it: the world and the knowing of it are one. In some poems, words are like fingers, a way of reading the world in Braille. The book’s opening poem, “Naming Things,” demonstrates this quality while gesturing back to the Edenic discovery of language. When the poem’s speaker says to her naturalist friend, “You gave me a book,” she seems to mean both the literal field guide from which the poet learns “California / false heliotrope” and “Gambel oak” and the volume that is the legible world: to be taught the name of things is to be given the world of/in language. She ends the poem with the “desire to enunciate” as a desire to touch the world and know it well. This desire results in a deeply lyrical, sometimes rapt, impulse for description: “Just a soft petal, a sweet song, an arched wing.” Images of the natural world build as a sort of litany throughout the book.
The desire to touch the world in enunciation also results in a frequent imagining of the ways in which the physical and the semantic meet in tongue and in sign language. Rejecting any Platonic dualism, Hamilton is drawn to the body’s giving forth of language. In, for instance, “I Want to be Called” she says, “You may make it lepidolite, / for its pinky purples charm me / and the sound makes my tongue dance,” a phrase to make the reader’s own tongue dance, to enact the union of the word and the world. In “Listing of the Latest Names,” she tells us that “Long hidden tribes had tongue-tripping / nomenclature.” How delicious the word nomenclature, which would normally seem so Latinately stuffy, is when felt along the tongue. Such lines call us to awareness of the physicality of language. We see this awareness again in “Signing in His Sleep,” which begins “The hearing child watched his parents / sign in their sleep” and goes on to imagine words as “the frosting / of green buds in spring” which “shelter to form canopy” and “at last turn brilliant, fall, dry, disappear.” Signing, such an obvious union of language and matter, is here not a compromise when regular speech is unavailable. Rather, it is the very epitome of language itself, exemplifying the physicality of communication.
Lexicography puts me in mind of one of last year’s best books of poetry, Kathleen Graber’s splendid The Eternal City. That Graber shares Hamilton’s view of the world as text is apparent in the title of the first poem, “Tolle! Lege!” (words taken from Augustine’s Confessions and best translated as “take up and read”). The command obviously applies to the book in hand but also serves as directions for life, or even as a description of the process of living in the world as if it were a text. Both Graber and Hamilton describe experience as a finely layered text in which, ultimately, history and personal memory, allusion and recollection, are not fully distinct. This complexity of vision, a thread unifying the whole collection, makes Lexicography a book that rewards reading and rereading.
Benjamin Myers won the 2011 Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry for his first book, Elegy for Trains (Village Books Press, 2010). His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in The New York Quarterly, Measure, Plainsongs, Borderlands, and many other journals. His essays have appeared in several academic journals, including Studies in Philology and English Literary History, and he has published reviews of contemporary poetry in World Literature Today as well as previously in Connotation Press. With a Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis, Myers teaches literature and writing at Oklahoma Baptist University. He blogs at www.myerspoetry.blogspot.com.
Stolen from Connotations Press website.