Door to Door by Emma Walton Hamilton, reviewed by Alex Russell
Emma Walton Hamilton’s Door to Door is a short collection of poems portioned off into five distinct, interrelated sections: “Homeland”, “Relocation”, “The Swamp Angel”, “Inside Out,” and “Prism.” Varying in their compositional style – from free verse, observational poems to concise, rhyming pieces, conversational to experimental – Hamilton’s work retains a sense of earned wisdom, a careful patience with life, and a dedicated measure of emotional distance from some of the subject matter in the book.
It is this slightly cold, somewhat detached tone – coupled with an artfully calculated language – that enables the better part of Door to Door to pick apart the dry eccentricities of life, from deciding what to wear every morning to the messy and contradicting nature of daily news and media, without lingering too long on any one topic or idea.
Literally going “door to door,” Hamilton’s collection of poems weaves through different styles and sources of inspiration, wearing the latter on its sleeve.
Writing after poets Billy Collins, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Frank O’Hara, Hamilton pays genuine tribute to these writers, taking the time to pause in each creator’s respective aesthetic and chip away at a segment of her own personal life experience – illuminating it with self-knowledge and poetic craft.
Movement, transience, impermanence – these are not just images or jumping-off points; Hamilton dives fully into these states and develops them as organic, fully-rounded themes.
“The Commute” is among the book’s lengthier pieces, concretely – and in naturalistic, Beat fashion – filtering through “the railway station,” “the city,” “the newspaper office,” all the way through “the same eternal round of events—/Murders, burglaries, suicides/by pistol, razor, rope, or poison,” condensing myriad daily observations into something crystalline. Hamilton carries the reader through physical places, past solid scenes inside familiar locations, all the while building on the book’s core themes.
“The Commute” starts with motion and ends in motion, as the narrator flies back “by rail/to my beloved swamp,/where I labor until dusk/overlooked only by an occasional crow.” In this small but pertinent fashion, Hamilton shines a light on transience as a kind of isolation or exile; not just a process, but a quagmirical state of mind. In fact, loneliness and solitude in its varying forms pops up time and again.
In “Spring Cleaning,” Hamilton recounts, in rhyme-free, matter-of-fact verse, the “residue of ten thousand meals,” “the sofa,” “every little room,” recontextualizing the living space she shares with her husband as a dangerous, stolid alcove – “our entrenchment.”
Door to Door, despite its themes and overall impressions, features several poems with a strong sense of mise-en-scène, situating the narrator firmly in a specific setting – whether corporeal or emotional.
The seven-piece section near the volume’s middle, titled “The Swamp Angel,” powerfully removes the reader from wherever they might be and transplants them to Hamilton’s swamp – a place of nature, silence, and privacy. The seventh poem in this section, “Omega,” viscerally places the reader alongside Hamilton in her small, bog-surrounded home.
“The morning glory vines/had commenced peeping in at the front windows,” a place overwhelmingly abundant in “birds and trees,” “perched on the brink/of the palisades.” Hamilton’s physical location has her reevaluate her spot in life – a healthy, transformative episode of self-doubt and an eventual return to other people:
“But here was I/a single bit of humanity/trying to live alone and away from my kind…A hermit is one who tries to be a tree,/and draw nourishment from one spot/when he’s really a deal more./A bear is not so foolish as to try and live among foxes,/neither should a man try to live among trees…So I left my hermitage,/I presume forever.”
Earlier in the book, in “Relocation,” Hamilton shrinks her perspective from places and household objects to other creatures – “A Moon Snail, accommodating someone else’s eggs./A family of Slipper Snails, clinging to a Scallop./A Quahog Clam, teeming with seawater and sand. A micro-ocean.” This piece, consisting of just four stanzas, is a concise, illustrative example of connectivity and reflection. The writer sees her inner struggles in “a cluster of treasures” on the beach, “each its own biosphere.”
“The host shells are otherwise empty,/neither landlord nor tenants having anticipated the tide,” a mournful, nuanced assessment of places that once possessed occupants; the signs of an old existence.
“I played God for a moment,/placing each one gently back in the surf–/cleaving to hope.” This encapsulates Hamilton’s strengths as a writer, strengths that are key to understanding and appreciating Door to Door.
Writing poetry from observations, experiences, and inspiration – whatever these might be – is a very old, at times therapeutic form of art, allowing the writer to reanalyze or make peace with something painful, difficult, or pervasive in their life. Playing God with the “host shells” on the beach represents the personification of her literary vocation – a look into her process and underlying motivation.
With recurring reflections into her daily living, there comes a small measure of peace. “I fiddle with my hair, pick or pluck/at minor divertissements, and compose myself/in prelude to the day.”
It is this ability to focus, in and out, on things, creatures, instances, scenes, and places – big and small – that characterizes her deeply personal, yet universal, and artfully balanced poetry. Door to Door is an opportunity to explore the occasional “beauty and harmony” in grounded, ordinary lives – with danger and chaos “just outside the margins.”
Emma Walton Hamilton
Door to Door
Published 2022, Andrews McMeel Publishing
Alex Russell earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from George Mason University and now works in the field of journalism and publishing. He has contributed poetry to a variety of literary magazines and art journals, such as The Elevation Review, 300 Days of Sun, and The Ignatian Literary Magazine. His contributions to the Falls Church News-Press, a locally owned newspaper in the Washington, DC area, can be found online at fcnp.com.