Remembering Saskia Hamilton (1967–2023)

Saskia was never quite of this world to me, as is true for many whose mentors occupy a hallowed place in the mind-heart. Even as I sat across from her in her office all those years ago, something in me already missed her. It strikes me now that we shared an initial wordless affinity that was confirmed and deepened over years by overlapping interests, acquaintances, and places we could point to.

I first met Saskia in 2008. When she read my poems, she was interested in the mind behind them, as though language were merely the veil through which something more permanent might assert itself. I was a sophomore in college—the idea that I might have a mind worth considering, not merely an aptitude for language, seemed an entirely different understanding of the practice of poetry. It took a while for me to move the needle from assertion over words toward something quieter, something more akin to what Saskia calls in All Souls, “the place where two kinds of time intersect, moments successive and moments infinite.” But I could already see—if not see, feel—the careful intelligence of her approach.

Stories about her own mentors held the intrigue of lore. One of Saskia’s many fascinating literary friendships was with critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick. Saskia was the one to collect all of Hardwick’s and Robert Lowell’s letters to each other, correcting the trespass of Lowell’s controversial collection, The Dolphin (1973), which drew on letters Hardwick had sent Lowell after he dissolved their marriage to pursue a relationship with Caroline Blackwood. When Hardwick died in 2007, she died believing the letters had been destroyed. Saskia would tell the story of the day that, while at a march, she received the call informing her that Hardwick’s letters had been found intact. She knew right away that she would play a vital part in restoring Hardwick’s voice by putting her letters in their right context. She published The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle in 2019.

So much of what came to inform my own critical paradigm over time—Christopher Ricks’s notion of rhyme as an act of “finding and reminding,” T.S. Eliot’s “fixity and flux,” Elizabeth Bishop’s counsel to Robert Lowell that “art just isn’t worth that much”—exists in her voice, so that these minds are at once themselves and her avatars. I turn them over and she’s there, in Emily Dickinson, Osip Mandelstam, Seamus Heaney. I hear John Clare in her soft tones, the mouse’s nest “progged,” a word she could spend an entire class illuminating.

Saskia loved teaching elegies—Frank Bidart’s “The Yoke,” Linda Gregg’s “Saying Goodbye to the Dead,” even Scottish murder ballads. Of course she loved elegies, with their singularly calibrated measure of pleasure and grief, of love and pain ongoing, of sheer feeling—yes, she had the most courage to feel of anyone I have ever known, trusting that somewhere, a page had been written that spoke to the organization of that particular emotion and could offer some clarity, relief.

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When I began my own teaching career, I drew on Saskia’s sensitive, encyclopedic wisdom each time I taught prosody, revisiting the concepts and approaches she had so patiently imparted. I’d occasionally remind students that I once had a professor who asked me to memorize the opening sixteen lines of Milton’s Paradise Lost, then write them down and scan them on the final exam page—a fascinating and empowering exercise. In 2017, I invited Saskia to guest-teach on Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, whose correspondences she had also edited. On another occasion, I invited her to lead a weekend poetry retreat for students, in which we studied the quietly dazzling poems she preferred, among them, selections of haiku. I deeply welcomed the feeling of being her student again. She gave me the two-volume tomes of T.S. Eliot’s Collected and Uncollected Poems, which for many years I kept at my desk at work.

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It is July 2021. Saskia is explaining the provenance of the tea we drink at her dining table. The loose-leaf is secured in old-fashioned yellow bags from trips to Amsterdam, where many of her family members still lived. The cups between us are fragile, but the tea set is so heavy, I struggle to lift it with one hand. Though I understand the prognosis, she does not, to my mind, look ill, and seems to approach the inexorable business of an attenuated life with the same patience and grace I have known her to bring to everything. Children’s toys litter the floor. Books are open facedown at her nearby desk. I know no one for whom reading is more vital, and yet so many of the ministrations ahead promise to make the attention that reading requires impossible.

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On our last visit, April 11, 2023, we were talking about her forthcoming collection, All Souls, published by Graywolf in September. My questions were half-formed at best. I’d read the book with unease at the finality it promised. Whatever its last line, it would be the last line of the last book by Saskia Hamilton.

I proceeded with a practicality borne out of love; I wanted to catalog her mind in her own words, and yet the very act of recording her seemed to deny the possibility of some miraculous alternative. Part of me knew that I would register her answers in one tense and share them in another. It was fitting that one of the underlying preoccupations of Saskia’s work had always been where language meets its limits. Time is one of those places: “The hours were as long as the road/or the future, the past was not our destiny,” she wrote in “Once” from Corridor.

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It becomes clear to me as I read All Souls how precarious language is in all this. Sections in “Faring,” the book’s opening poem, capture the mental state of one whose concentration is challenged by pain and the muddling effect of medications designed to combat the body’s misfiring. The lyric fragment isn’t just a mode but a fact of mind, a currency for instability, the shifting light witnessed daylong from a window the day after a treatment. The voice grapples with being at once fully of this world and obliged to contend with truths beyond it. These are not new concerns in Saskia’s work, but they are differently legible under the weight of what chance has presented. One hears a sort of magical thinking beneath the cataloging:

Strength of feeling now vanished but the memory of it is of a kinship of some kind.

In its recollection, it registers unease beneath the day.

“I love you,” he says, “but maybe we shouldn’t profess our love for one another because, you know, it might mean you’ll die?”
—From “Faring”

“And what is actual?” she asks in the following section, tracing the etymology to a cauterizing agent. Words matter, true, to the degree that, under pressure, an almost compulsive grasp of their underlying meanings might be a sort of lifeline. Words travel to us from very far away to arrive where they are, where we are.

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At the time of her diagnosis, Saskia was a vice provost of Barnard College, a job few poets would sign up to undertake, and even fewer could dream of executing as capably. Words like “networking” were meaningless to her, which doesn’t mean she wasn’t practical and visionary in her efforts.

Why should this matter? It turns out it matters a great deal that the people who shape us offer us examples beyond what the culture easily provides. I watched her navigate the world of poetry and academia by her own compass, setting a table for past and present minds, seating them side by side in stimulating, unexpected ways. She taught me that curiosity was a sort of currency that made one hunger for precision, and that this could be the place where poems come from. She was never in a rush while reading a poem out loud, nor did she bother with arriving at tidy conclusions. This was what a life in poetry promised: a timeless freedom of the mind, and the welcome company of the dead.

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The morning of her death, the sky was covered in thick haze from wildfires, orange clouds burnishing the early summer leaves. Entering this absence, this loneliness of saying goodbye to someone who understood so well, and whose existence I cherished, is a peace that is anything but peaceful. “I don’t think of reading as being apart from life—I think of it as being part of a life,” Saskia said on our last visit in April while discussing All Souls. “It’s not an escape from anything. It’s a deepening of one’s experience.” I am aware that we are gifted only a handful of such people in a life, and so gratitude makes room for itself beside the grief. I am grateful to have known in real time the blessing that spread across our years of friendship, to have known how lucky I have been.