Lucy Hamilton

This collection of essays explore the beautiful city of Fuzhou and its history and literature. Based on several journeys to the southern Chinese city, the authors discuss literature and culture, religion and nature. Issues that are touched upon in these essays include the literature of its most famous son, Tang Xianzu and compare his work with that of William Shakespeare. Tang and Shakespeare both died in the same year, 1616, and the two playwrights serve as representatives of East and West, as well as the possibilities of bridging the gaps across the continents. Elsewhere, these essays describe visits to the Caoshan Temple, the cradle of the Caodong school of Zen Buddhism. Our travellers meet Master Yangli, the first female master of the temple, and hear her profound ideas about integrating with nature and the status of Buddhism in the modern world. These essays offer stimulating impressions on cultural exchange, tradition in the 21st century, and humanities place in a changing landscape, all with the backdrop of the historic city of Fuzhou.

"When I approach experimental poetry, particularly when it's related to images - the ekphrastic relationship - I ask myself, does it work? By that I mean, does it carry off the symbiotic closeness, does it make me feel there's a strong reason why the two art forms feed off each other? In the case of Lucy Hamilton's 'Viewer / Viewed', the answer is a resounding Yes. First, the images: photomontages of close family members are transposed with each other, making one instead of two separate photos. The photomontage method is in a tradition pioneered by the German photo-montage artist Hannah Hoech (1889-1978) and later by the contemporary British conceptual artist John Stezaker's Marriage (Film Portrait Collage) series, though Hamilton's are not so surreal. Her photomontages led her, after a fallow period, to begin writing poems. "The tug of juxtaposition": the inspiration for the creation of image and poem in this work, enabling her to resurrect memories of those she has grown up with and loved, the places she has travelled to, the objects holding significant meaning for her. The poems are composed in couplets and consist of thought and image units, decisions of what to juxtapose, quotations, and pauses separated by vertical lines or lines that begin with capital letters. The beauty of this process - for this work is, among other things, an illustration of a poetic process - results in the poems' extraordinary accessibility and clarity. The back-and-forthness of image and poem, each illuminating the other, is exactly what a successful ekphrastic relationship should display, and what makes this collection ultimately so original and rewarding.

ANNA RETURNS TO FACE A PAST SHE NEVER TRULY LEFT BEHINDIt wasn’t the middle but the very edge of nowhere. It was always just a little too still. It is 2017. Typhoon Hato has ripped through the streets of Hong Kong. National Day is looming. The momentum of the 2014 Umbrella Revolution has faded. British woman, Anna, has returned to her old village in the New Territories to search for Kallum, a disillusioned local activist, from whom she has heard nothing since her departure two years ago. Suspecting he was targeted for his involvement in the protests, Anna widens her search, scouring the streets of Kowloon and the Island for signs he is alive. Alone in her tiny, rented room in the notorious Chungking Mansions, gruesome flashbacks disturb her sleep. Paranoia swells. Memory, delusion, and reality begin to blur. Against a backdrop of construction works, storm damage and scaffolding, Anna is confronted by a daunting panorama. She may know more about the past than she’s let herself believe.

"There is nobody writing prose poetry in any way close to Lucy Hamilton's. Of Heads & Hearts is an intricate and rich collection that riffs on the interconnectedness of human relationships with the deft movements of a musical score. Here is a poet writing at the height of her talent using precise and controlled language to build toward a cumulative collage of characters, threads and associations all in conversation with one another. Of Heads & Hearts becomes more and more rewarding with each re-reading, most notably the utter ache at the heart of the `Requiem for the Engineer' sequence." -Kaddy Benyon "With each new story, this collection extends its reach and increases its hold on the reader. The work of the poet here is not to claim authority over a series of elusive moments but to curate their collection. Eclectic, absorbing, tender and funny, the poems testify to the mind's restlessness and its inventive responses to the world." -Lucy Sheerman

The insidious peril that haunts these pages appears in various guises against a backdrop of France, Germany, Greece, the USA and the UK. Stalker is a collection of prose poems in which the narrator attempts to make sense of everyday experience, turning to Rilke, Van Gogh, Steinbeck and others in her quest for understanding.