All Souls, Saskia Hamilton’s fourth collection of poetry, begins with light, barely: “Light before you call it light graying the sky,” she writes. From this liminal, nearly pre-language moment of transition, of recurrent beginning, the poem moves to “doves on window / ledges” who “call and answer” and an investigation of the word “as,” which “means like but also while.” This world is filled with capacious multiplicity. Hamilton renders scenes with incredible detail and attention. “Wet asphalt,” “green everywhere on the ground,” “the rib of the building,” and “white sky” populate the book. So do 1940s Arnhem, a cancer treatment center, and a child’s video game. Hamilton brings her uncanny focus to scenes from the present moment, history, and memory, and by fixing them in incisive detail, she reveals their ineffable interiors.
All Souls was published posthumously in the fall of 2023, just months after Hamilton’s death at age 56. The book stares unflinchingly into this reality: “Who becomes familiar with mortal illness for very long,” Hamilton wonders. In four spacious, expansive poems, she interweaves moments of illness and rest with an unfurling investigation of time, memory, and history. In this way, she approaches the essential creative and spiritual dilemma of mortality.
In some ways, All Souls is a palimpsestic layering of thought, of revisiting and reworking the major existential and poetic concerns that have appeared throughout her life’s work. We see a singular, remarkable thinker in her final moments of reckoning. In the second poem of All Souls, “Exits and Entrances to the Auditorium,” Hamilton reflects on Matsuo Basho’s death poem, for which she named her first collection of poetry, As for Dream. The recurrence is a devastating, beautiful completion.
In “Entrances and Exits to the Auditorium,” one of the book’s primary aesthetic and emotional impulses begins to emerge: to find an “organizing principle” for a moment, for a life. (The idea of the “organizing principle” appears in her first book, As for Dream, in the poem “Slow Train.”) “According to Kant,” Hamilton writes in All Souls, “we are compelled to bring a form of structuring activity to experience.”
Hamilton notices “patterns of breath” and the order that breathing creates in a moment. In some places, breath is impermanent—it will “run out.” In others, it is everlasting, immortal—we hear the rush of “breath going out for a decade / returning in a century.” Breath, the speaker says, is both “involuntary” and “interpretative,” and it returns throughout the book as a way for the speaker to listen to, perhaps measure, time.
Counting emerges as another, more interpretative, or invented, form of organization. The speaker waits, immobilized, inside a PET scan machine, and, feeling “the mind’s hallucinatory wanderings,” turns to structure:
Then I began to count, to twenty, to make the length between one
and two, and two and three, and three and four, long enough so that
at twenty I would be quarter-inched backwards through the machine
a stop, time passing more slowly from numeral to numeral, to fill the
space of half an hour
—because if the count went past twenty it would be somehow
unbearable—because immeasurable.
This counting manages time but also attempts to alter the experience of it, perhaps the nature of it. Though there is randomness to the measuring mechanism, if the imposed structure were to fall apart, it would be “unbearable.” Life, time, space, unmeasured, feels treacherous, horrifying, just like thinking. Allowed to go wherever it wants, it becomes hallucinatory and lurid. These poems find themselves at the edge of the unbearable; they feel for the limit of the unthinkable and then listen for whatever lies beyond.
The search for an organizing principle is also a formal question. How does a poet order sound and thought on the page? How does language impose order on sound and thought? The poems of All Souls move in and out of different modes: poems, lyric fragments, prose poems, quotes, and poems within poems. In their different formal modes, these poems “pace the movement of thought;” in their pauses, suspensions, and silences, they give us “instructions for listening.”
Toward the end of “Exits and Entrances to the Auditorium,” Hamilton invokes Emily Dickinson’s “There’s a certain Slant of light,” paying special attention to the graphic marks. “The dashes induce shortness of breath in the reader,” Hamilton reflects, “as if we are / meant to mimic the shadows in their intent listening. We pause to / hear a sound so faint it may only be visible.” As Dickinson’s shadows “hold their breath,” Hamilton wonders:
What do the landscape’s shadows anticipate? For when the light
passes, their edges will be erased, they will vanish. Or will they have
complete dominion?
The two opposite, totalizing possibilities for the shadows recall the idea of the extended count becoming “unbearable—because immeasurable.” Without edges, visible structures, marks, or lines, meaning disappears. As the boundaries between the speaker’s interior and exterior worlds slide and dissolve throughout the book, the investigation of edges becomes an existential one. Hamilton explores Dickinson’s organizing principles, or representation of such principles, and in this way, illuminates the edges of Dickinson’s language to move beyond it and expand its revelations.
Hamilton’s invocation of Dickinson also functions as one of the book’s many investigations of “who and what moves across and beneath time.” Hamilton is never alone; along with Basho, Kant, and Dickinson, she thinks alongside the likes of Donne, Proust, Hardwick, a beloved family friend, Drion, and many more voices from the past. Fragments from poems, essays, and novels are culled and considered. What arises is a polyvocal, choral approach to thinking, in communion with history, with the dead, with the thoughts, the souls, of those who have come before her.
Similarly, brief, intimate scenes from histories are rendered and brought to life. In one moment, Wordsworth and Coleridge ride in a carriage together through the countryside, in another, a bottle of pomegranate juice is passed amongst the wounded in WWII Arnhem. These glimpses of the past are exceedingly alive, imbued with detail and specificity. Time slides and moves, the poet not bound by “the relationship of history to chronology.” Considering a churchyard where the dead were once “removed for the coming of the underground,” the speaker wonders, “Does it help to remember them when hearing the sound of time?”
Just as these poems listen carefully to time, they also challenge it. They move in and around it, they understand its authority, and yet they refuse its forward movement. These poems recognize time as one of many sounds heard in a moment and they invite it in, making it visible. Time might be marked by the hour, “7:20,” the period, “late in the season,” or by passing days, “A Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. / A Saturday. A Sunday.” But within and around these demarcations, the poems expand and contradict, often finding more powerful forces by which to track a thought or experience. Just as they seek organizing principles, these poems also disorganize; they rebel in the face of time that rushes toward an ending.
As the text moves across vast swaths of time and space, or “time as space,” it also moves, many times, through the night. In the interstitial moments of waking “from sleep to sleep,” Hamilton inhabits the ephemeral, lucid dream space that has occupied her entire oeuvre. In the eponymous central poem, “All Souls”:
The boy touches your arm in his sleep
for ballast. It’s warm in the hold. Between
ship and sky, the bounds of sight
alone, sphere so bounded.
“The boy,” Hamilton’s son, moves through the pages of the book, playing, rustling, making exuberant noise. His presence is so alive, so beloved. Earlier in “All Souls,” Hamilton, quoting Tennyson, writes that “death closes all,” and that facing death becomes “knowledge completed.” Here, it is not death that closes all, but love. It is the speaker’s love for her child, the comfort of two who find ballast in each other, that seals the sphere of experience. It is not an encounter with death but an encounter with love that becomes “knowledge completed,” that fills “the bounds of sight.” Just as these poems refuse to allow time and death completion, here in the darkness of the night, the moment of love is complete and everlasting, even in the face of an unbearable, immeasurable fate.
All Souls is an act of love so deep—for the boy, for the world, for language’s ability to soothe, prepare, and resist. It investigates our bounds of sight and knowing, it faces and refuses death at once. The book itself moves across and beneath time, communes immortally, and holds everything still. Hamilton’s astonishing final act is a kind of suspension, a breath going out forever, a piece of evidence that, in language, we may continue.
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