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The inspiration
behind Lucy Hamilton's collection of prose poems is a fascinating mixture of
fragmented memory, dreams, imagination and literary sources. Their images
stayed in my mind days after I'd stopped reading, and I felt compelled to go
back and reread. The poems work together to create a kind of memoir, or
perhaps 'anti‑memoir', since there is no immediately recognisable
chronological order. Nevertheless, the book has a kind of flowing structure,
so that the fragmentary quality of the work does not prevent it from reading
also as a coherent whole. Stalker is divided into seven sections, or one might say 'movements'. The
first, 'Ghosts & Clochards', goes back to memories of childhood and
youth, exploring the narrator's discovery of, and relationship with, what she
experiences as 'other'. This other may, for example, be a part of her own
body, or perhaps someone who is an outcast on the street. In the prose poem
'Feet', which offers a memory (or dream?) of staying with 'Tante Annie', the child narrator wonders what she
looks like as she wanders through the woods. It is as if she is for the first
time becoming aware of herself as an object in the eyes of people she knows
or doesn't know. Later, she sits 'on the edge of my bed cradling each foot in
turn, trying to read its sole. Where does it want to go? Is it any part of me at all?' There is of course a play here on
the word 'sole' with 'soul'. This is an apt poem to begin the book, for the
narrator is at the dawn of an as‑yet unarticulated realisation that her
life must take certain directions, and she wonders how much say she will have
in the matter. At the same time, we as readers are made aware (though not in
any obtrusive way) that the writer is haunted by this past self, whose mind
and body she re‑enters as she looks back at the pathways taken or not
taken.
In the next pages we see the child or adolescent narrator noticing those who
are outcast. She is separated from them, and yet one feels that she too is
going to experience what it is like to be an outcast herself. Her body is
'hard and young under the reversible green and gold cape my mother made for
me', but she 'can sense their bodies, misshapen and clammy inside newspapers
and rags' (from 'Ghost-riders'). There is already a sense of the conflict
between literary reality and the reality she sees, hears and smells around
her. 'Why pick Les Fleurs du mal, I ask, when le clochard is my daily staple?' (from 'Clochard').
Indeed, much of Lucy Hamilton's book, it seems to me, is an attempt at
bringing different realities together to make a life which retains its
subjective passions, that which renders us unique as individuals, yet which
must also take into account the demands and needs of the rest of the world.
There is, by implication, an existential questioning of what it means to be a
self. How much of what we are is defined by the way others perceive us? How
is it possible to live authentically?
Section 2, 'Storms and Stations', looks at youthful relationships and the
adventures offered by 'romance', in the widest sense of that word. Reading
these poems brought back to me my own youthful experiences of living and
working in Paris. Both the city and an epoch - that of the late sixties and
early seventies - are evoked in a series of vivid sketches. The narrator
knows the metro stations 'like the freckles on my skin, each with its own
distinction' (from 'Montparnasse-Rambouillet'). 'The aisle rocks with bodies
clinging to leather straps [...] Someone flicks a Gauloise to the floor and
stubs it with his foot... all eyes switch to where it smoulders between two
slats. I watch the barge disappear as if it's taking my life away' (from
'Dark Matters'). Later she will
remember the man 'slumped on the metro steps, clutching a board with the
words veteran de guerre: veuillez aider' (from 'Old Man').
The next sections take us from Paris to the USA and Greece, before coming to
early adulthood in the UK. Still
the narrator is living two different realities - the literary and the one she
experiences around her - and trying, impossibly it seems, to make them meet
in one whole. She arrives 'in Aberdeen with nothing but a small suitcase and
200 duty‑frees', and with
'the 'problem of Katúsha Máslova' occupying her mind (from 'Nigg Bay,
Aberdeen'). The seeming casualness of the fact that she has for the moment
ended up in Aberdeen of all places reminds us of the sheer absurdity of the
chance factors that can shape our lives, whatever else we may have decided.
The narrator goes through a time of intense anguish where 'each morning I try
to open my eyes, touch them and wince. I grope along the corridor clutching
the wall-tiles. This is the dawn ritual' (from 'Sleep'). 'Absurd friends'
help her while the doctor 'prescribes medication, tells me to break my affair
with Ionesco' (from 'Absurd Nights'). There are, however, also moments of
celebration, of sheer joy in living, for example when the narrator and her
friend 'wash our hair on the ferry drinking Whisky Mac. Sleep either side of
a man, in his triple sleeping-bag' (from 'A Cliff at Hayle').
There are more travels, to Germany and through the UK, more meetings, more
friendships, more romances before the narrator, at least to all appearances,
settles down into early adulthood and work ('a blessing I cannot always
feel'). Yet it is clear from the last section, 'Stalker', that the author's
life is still a haunted one, one where she must stagger to the mirror 'to
face the stranger in my face [...] The reflection is distorted. If I break the
mirror I'm done for' (from 'The Compulsion').
Lucy Hamilton's Stalker
is a courageous and beautiful book. It is one I shall keep returning to.
© Ian Seed
2012
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