More Featherishly PurpleIan Hamilton’s Collected Poems.
by Michael Hofmann
Collected Poems, by Ian Hamilton, ed. by Alan Jenkins.
Faber and Faber. £14.99.
Though Ian Hamilton died in 2001 of cancer, I still see him sometimes in party rooms, at literary gatherings, burly, almost square, with the low center of gravity of a Scottish ex-middleweight or ex-wing half, encased in his black Crombie overcoat (indoors, radiating simultaneously cold and impermeability), invariably smoking—oh, how we used to smoke in those days—and making what Sam Selvon, the Trinidad novelist, calls “oldtalk”—senior conversation. Ian McEwan once described him as having “the face of a capo di capi, and a useful, understated cool.” A conspiratorial element of backroom, exile, spit, and sawdust clung to him. He put one in mind of a boxing manager or a soccer coach. His father’s middle name was Tough. The habitual set of his face was a sort of tender scowl. He had the secret sorrow one might look for in a Tottenham Hotspurs fan and serial founder and editor of little magazines. The cowboyishly skewed mouth—the word “hardbitten” might have been invented for it—passing sotto voce ten ton judgments was much more familiar to me from Craig Raine’s gifted and unexpectedly devoted imitations of him than from the real thing. In fact, parties aside, I saw him very few times, though these, oddly, seem as though they could furnish a biography. An ill-advised lunch at my instigation in the early eighties, just after his life of Robert Lowell appeared, at which Ian drank more than he spoke, and I hadn’t yet learned to drink (“those played-with-but-uneaten lunches for which he was famous” in the words of his friend, the novelist Dan Jacobson; “You never ate; / Just pushed things round and round your plate / Till you could decently light up again,” in those of Alan Jenkins’s poem “Rotisserie (The Wait)”—but how was I to know that?). Then there was the time he popped up in a playground in Queens Park, which was the wrong suburb, with a daughter I had no idea he had—he was supposed to be away in Wimbledon, and with sons—growling something about Catherine (innocently pulling at a bottle of water) having inherited her father’s thirst. I saw him another time going into the publisher’s to fetch some boxes of things, wearing a camouflage jacket, and with a station wagon idling outside, in the throes of moving house or changing lives. Later, there was a group reading in Manchester, even as an unbuttoned United having won the European Cup were paraded through the city on an open-topped municipal bus; we made our way through thousands of onlookers to read to a disappointed bookstore manager and a dozen nutcas—sorry, poetry lovers. I saw Ian the next morning, already ensconced in the London train, and felt far too shy to join him; but when I opened my newspaper, his name leapt out to greet me. It was his contribution to a series—this speaks volumes on a certain positively idealistic streak in English cultural philistinism, its fearless Quixotic heroism—on “overrated books.” Ian’s chosen target was The Waste Land...
More at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=238416
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