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Hamer, Forrest (1956– )
Prize-winning poet, literary critic, and practicing
psychologist Forrest Hamer was born on August
31, 1956, in Goldsboro, North Carolina, to Forrest
T. Hamer (U.S. Army) and Bertha Barnes Hamer,
an elementary school teacher. Raised in North
Carolina, Hamer graduated from Yale with hon-
ors and received a doctorate in psychology from
the University of California, Berkeley. The author
of two volumes of poems, twice a nominee for the
Pushcart Prize, and a semifinalist for the 1995 Yale
Younger Poets Series, Hamer is also the author
of essays and reviews on A. R. Ammons, George
Higgins, Marilyn Nelson, and REGINALD SHEP-
HERD. An advanced candidate at the San Francisco
Psychoanalytic Institute, Hamer is a lecturer in
psychology and social welfare at the University of
California, Berkeley.
Forrest Hamer’s poetic voice is confessional,
unsentimental, delicate, crystalline, and intensely
autobiographical; it coheres around memories of
his childhood and adolescence in the South. His
syntax of affective association is brought on by
such repeated injunctions as Say (“Middle Ear”),
Consider (“Sign”), and Suppose (“13 Suppositions
about the Ubiquitous”). He uses the quiet, spare
elegance of contemporary free verse—the lan-
guage of ROBERT HAYDEN and MICHAEL HARPER—
not only to convey his own melancholy, as a gay
man alone in the wake of loss (the specter of
AIDS unspoken but present in poems like “With-

out John”) but also to describe his black kin and

brethren with powerful precision. “Down by the

Riverside” illuminates one intersection of personal

and public history as Hamer guides the reader

through a child’s evolving consciousness of war as

his father fights in Vietnam. “Choir Practice” ex-

plores Hamer’s conscious reconnection, after long

silence and alienation, to his family, heritage, and

history from a multiplicity of angles, including

his encounters with his hectoring muse, a slave

woman calling him to authenticity. “Why/have

you come here if not to sing?” she asks.

His first volume, Call and Response (1995),

charting “... the story / about how ways change

over time according / to an urgency the young feel

to insist themselves / in history” (“The Fit of Old

Customs”), won the 1995 Beatrice Hawley Award.

Structured as a baptism, the volume’s poems are

trellised along the secular ramifications of black

religious tradition, as the cadences of church

music, the Bible, and sermons infuse the poems.

The church organist, a “man who kept company

with men,” brings the assembled to confirmation,

to deeper knowing: “Our family is here with us,

even the dead and the not-born; / We are journey-

ing to the source of all wonder, / We journey by

dance. Amen” (“Goldsboro narrative #24: Second

benediction”).

Freer, less formally tied to meaning and tra-

ditional syntax, Hamer’s second volume, Mid-

dle Ear (2000), winner of the Bay Area Book