Reviewers Association Award, makes of its title
multiple metaphors, among them the ear as the
organ of sentience (“a man goes deaf because he
isn’t listening’) and the meaning of middle age: “I
could be wrong, but I think my life is half over.”
But it is only with age—perhaps, in Hamer’s case,
with a necessary, painful silence occasioned by
racial complexity and an initially shaming sexual-
ity—that wisdom comes: “... change happens with
small sights / Which accrete and feather. We see, we
become” (“Arrival”). “The Tuning” reflects the ear
as the body’s music, Hamer’s willingness to be as
attuned to his body as to the poem: with deep pres-
ence, astonishing vulnerability, anguished beauty.
“The Last Leg,” the opening poem of Middle Ear,
is an ambitious, mysterious, beautifully written,
dreamlike poem about (among other things) the
untethered imagination of poetry:
When I approach the horse hued the bluing
moon,
It leans into the ground and will not be
mounted.
The whinny is laughter;
I have been tricked. I can never go back.
It rains gallops the rest of that night.In “Grace,” the vivid memory of a boy’s love for
his mother collapses the space between past and
present. “When she would fall into her thoughts,
we’d look for what distracted her from us,” the
poet recalls, gentle with himself in remembering
the self-absorption of that first, fierce, love.
“Crossroads,” a poem borrowing early BLUES
rhythms and based on the legend of blues musi-
cian Robert Johnson’s bargain with the devil, is
a lyric meditation on a young man’s coming to
terms with his selfhood, his wholeness, his ho-
mosexuality: “A man give his hand and he pulled
me to the shore / Man give his hand, pulled me
over to the shore / Told me if I come I wouldn’t
drown no more.” In “The Different Strokes Bar,
San Francisco,” the speaker in the poem wants
to remember wonder, to stay alive to the thrill of
discovering a body that begins to claim not only
desire, but joy, “the dancing going on all about /
your new and hungry body,” while the specter of
absence, of loss—a precognition of AIDS, per-
haps—haunts the poem: “Maybe I could see men
dancing themselves invisible / one by handsome
one, that year before they began to go.” Even the
poem titles in this volume are evocative, among
them “13 Suppositions about the Ubiquitous,”
“Annual Visit of the Quiet, Unmarried Son,” and
“Charlene-N-Booker 4Ever.”
“Cinder Cone,” a poem from Hamer’s third vol-
ume, Rift: Poems, imagines the violent military and
political angers that separate land masses, conti-
nents, countries, and tribes, as painfully, familiarly
familial: “The continents still ache for each other,
/ but before they find their ways back, they will go
farther, / deny us.”
Hamer’s work has appeared in such journals as
CALLALOO, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, TriQuar-
ter ly, and ZYZZYVA and in the anthologies Best
American Poetry 1994 and 2000, The Geography of
Home (1999), and Word of Mouth: An Anthology
of Gay American Poetry, as well as in Robert Hass’s
Poet’s Choice: Poems for Everyday Life (1998) and
in Billy Collins’s Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Po-
etry (2003).BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hamer, Forrest. “Poet and Psychoanalyst: Listening
More Deeply.” American Psychoanalyst 34, no. 3
(2000).
———. “The Visitor.” In Lucky Break: How I Became
a Writer, edited by Howard Junker, 47–51. Ports-
mouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1999.
Koolish, Lynda. “Forrest Hamer.” African American
Writers: Portraits and Visions. Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2001.
Lynda KoolishHamilton, Virginia (1936–2002)
Growing up on a small farm near Yellow Springs,
Ohio, in the 1940s, Virginia Hamilton was sur-
rounded by the sights, sounds, and smells of rural
America and by her large extended family of cous-
ins, uncles, and aunts. All these things and people
come into play in the children’s stories Hamil-
ton wrote as an adult. She was influenced by herHamilton, Virginia 223