Steam-Cleaning Love (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | J. A. Hamilton | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

Lesbian. Poetry. Queer. LGBT studies. Poetry. Letters to women. Love poems.

Jane Eaton Hamilton distinguished herself with Body Rain (1991) a tough, passionate lyrical book written out of a woman's anger and a woman's love. Steam-Cleaning Love, Hamilton's second book of poetry, is "ginger root tough and jelly edgy"-spicy, sweet, biting; it overwhelms, inundates, the palate. This new book revives the angry, biting, funny, loving, randy voice that won readers to her first volume, but sets that voice in a gentler space. These are passionate poems that celebrate women as friends and lovers, and the beauty, the delight, the desire of women's bodies.

"There is joy in these poems, and a vibrant healthiness. Her poems are about many things we might like to call ordinary, but they’re written in a way that’s anything but."--sub-TERRAIN

"Her poetry is often ribald, and sometimes it is frankly lewd--and how, these days, one welcomes a bit ofhonest lewdness."--BC Bookworld

"Hamilton has an attractively skittish voice that lends the work a very individual cast. An accomplished collection."--Books in Canada

"I was impressed by the amazing insights; an incredible rendering of the pain and joys of truly loving relationships."--ARC

"...Hamilton knows how to forge tough language and difficult truths into poetry, and this collection includes many well-wrought and satisfying poems.

The first section, “How We Are Counted,” contains poems that are primarily centred on the body, with a smattering of poems on mysticism and betrayal. Some of these poems struck me as brave, particularly “Apology”: “Eventually I was the liar… I betrayed you easily / as rain falls, as earth thirsts, / my fledg-ling hunger / parting its beak / for the worm, for the for the kiss, / the satisfying thrust.”

Hamilton seems at her best when talking big poems with big subjects; some writers need the added weight of a big poem in order to really show some of their muscles, and this seems to be the case here. In “Barbara’s Garden,” written for a woman whose lover has died of cancer, Hamilton shows great facility with language: “the sky above Stanley Park feckled with stars, / the candles on our table unwavering…” The narrator imagines Barbara “listening for the vibration of life,” and “her articulate flight / through the thicket of the body.”

It’s in the third section, “Window Box of Bruises,” that many of the tough and hard-won poems rise up. “Rising” shows the narrator shadowed by her dead friend in “October, that hell month… Four weeks / of changing clocks, of sparklers / moaning on the streets. Let Diane / tell you, using my tongue, gibbling / her story with my larynx and these / ugly teeth.” --Sarah Van Arsdale, Lesbian Review of Books

"Reading [these poems] is like reading other people's letters until, by the transforming magic good poems have, you discover they are all for you." -Jane Rule