These are prose poems with a difference, with an occasional breaking into verse, erudite yet full of engagement and interesting information which in no way shuts out the curious reader… Hamilton’s relationship to ‘the world out there’ is real and described with verve and an often sensual immediacy but it’s also mediated by a strong awareness of a virtual reality universe which is all pervasive. In ‘Mules and Men’, for example, we get this― ‘The Diarist has inadvertently deleted her latest draft. The story’s / imagined but she knows it well, easily retrieving Tangiers: /the noise & mules & men excitingly shocking to the 1930s English!’ This could be an illusion to Paul Bowles and/or internet street mapping. There’s a richness of material here which includes a history of slavery as well as a particular evocation of time and place and there’s certainly an element of political critique going on which is repeated elsewhere in the text.
(Review in Stride)
Lucy Hamilton Poetry 