Viewer / Viewed

"When I approach experimental poetry, particularly when it's related to images — the ekphrastic relationship — I ask myself, does it work? By that I mean, does it carry off the symbiotic closeness, does it make me feel there's a strong reason why the two art forms feed off each other? In the case of Lucy Hamilton's 'Viewer / Viewed', the answer is a resounding Yes. First, the images: photomontages of close family members are transposed with each other, making one instead of two separate photos. The photomontage method is in a tradition pioneered by the German photo-montage artist Hannah Höch (1889-1978) and later by the contemporary British conceptual artist John Stezaker's Marriage (Film Portrait Collage) series, though Hamilton's are not so surreal. Her photomontages led her, after a fallow period, to begin writing poems. "The tug of juxtaposition": the inspiration for the creation of image and poem in this work, enabling her to resurrect memories of those she has grown up with and loved, the places she has travelled to, the objects holding significant meaning for her. The poems are composed in couplets and consist of thought and image units, decisions of what to juxtapose, quotations, and pauses separated by vertical lines or lines that begin with capital letters. The beauty of this process — for this work is, among other things, an illustration of a poetic process — results in the poems' extraordinary accessibility and clarity. The back-and-forthness of image and poem, each illuminating the other, is exactly what a successful ekphrastic relationship should display, and what makes this collection ultimately so original and rewarding.