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 Höch (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 to accord proportion notmeaning not even aesthetic value to invite the tugof juxtaposition
"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.
-Robert Vas Dias
Hamilton, Lucy: - Lucy Hamilton grew up in Norfok, England with her French mother and Liverpudlian father, the youngest of six children. She lived in Paris in her late teens before returning to study in Birmingham. She began a career in secondary school teaching in London (Whitechapel and Brixton) and worked in schools across the UK. Most recently she taught English as an Alternative Language to Chinese and South Korean boarding students at Ashford School, Kent. She has run poetry workshops for the Poetry School and the University of Cambridge.She was joint-winner of the Poetry School Award in 2007 and since then has published a pamphlet, Sonnets for my Mother (Hearing Eye, 2009), and two collections of prose poems with Shearsman Books. Stalker (2012) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and a sequence, 'Blood-Letting' from Of Heads & Hearts (2018), was Highly Commended in the Forward Book of Poetry 2019. The poem 'Messengers', from her work-in-progress 'Travelling with the I Ching', won First Prize in the SL Artemis poetry competition, 2020.Lucy co-edited Long Poem Magazine from its inception in 2008 until 2018. Since 2015 she has worked as a freelance writer, editor, poet, organiser and coordinator for Cam Rivers Publishing and the annual Xu Zhimo Poetry & Arts Festival, a UK-China partnership based at King's College Cambridge and Fuzhou City, Jiangxi Province. In this capacity she has contributed to several work residencies in Sichuan, Jiangxi, and elsewhere in China.She was awarded the Xu Zhimo Lifelong Achievement Award 2023.
