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A
Poem by Barnard Professor Saskia Hamilton Published in The
New Yorker
New
York, N.Y.— Saskia Hamilton, Acting Director of Women
Poets at Barnard, had her poem, Elegy, published
in the April 21-28 edition of The New Yorker.
According to Hamilton, her poem "emerged during the time
we were all waiting for the Iraq war and living through the
Afghanistan war. I was wondering if mourning is ever finished."
Though she was unaware of it when she was writing, Hamilton
now believes she drew on poems about burial by T.S. Eliot
and W.B. Yeats. In Elegy, she writes:
The work of burial is never done. First the interruption,
then the interruption, so it’s carried on in sleep,
over to argument, floating in the water with the flowers…
Hamilton published her first book of poetry, As for Dream,
in 2001, and is currently working on her second. Poet Forrest
Gander wrote of As for Dream, " we are taken,
figuratively and literally, by storm."
Hamilton teaches in the Department of English and directs
the noted Women Poets at Barnard series. Hamilton’s
poems and prose have appeared in a number of journals including
Chicago Review, Salt: An International Journal of Poetry
and Poetics, the Threepenny Review, Colorado Review, and
McSweeney’s Quarterly. She is also the editor of
an upcoming edition of Robert Lowell’s letters. Hamilton
is the recipient of a Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study.
Contact: Petra Tuomi, Office of Public Affairs, 212-854-7907
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