The Visit: Poems
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner
From one of Britain's most exacting and influential postwar poets comes The Visit, a slim but devastating collection that announces Ian Hamilton as a master of lyric compression. Published by Faber and Faber in 1970, this debut volume chronicles grief, illness, and intimate loss through a series of tightly wrought poems, many of them centred on the prolonged mental illness of Hamilton's first wife, Gisela — visits to a hospital ward transformed into quiet, shattering meditations on love and helplessness. Hamilton's style is one of radical economy: each poem strips language to its barest essentials, leaving nothing but pure emotional residue on the page. Described by critics as among the finest examples of confessional verse in the English tradition, The Visit sits in conversation with the work of Robert Lowell while remaining wholly and distinctively Hamilton's own. For a poet who would later become celebrated as a formidable literary critic and biographer, this collection stands as a remarkable testament to what poetry can achieve when silence is as carefully measured as the words themselves — and the reader is left wondering how so few lines can carry such immense weight.
Author: Ian Hamilton
Format: Hardback
Published: 1970, Faber and Faber
Genre: Poetry
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner
From one of Britain's most exacting and influential postwar poets comes The Visit, a slim but devastating collection that announces Ian Hamilton as a master of lyric compression. Published by Faber and Faber in 1970, this debut volume chronicles grief, illness, and intimate loss through a series of tightly wrought poems, many of them centred on the prolonged mental illness of Hamilton's first wife, Gisela — visits to a hospital ward transformed into quiet, shattering meditations on love and helplessness. Hamilton's style is one of radical economy: each poem strips language to its barest essentials, leaving nothing but pure emotional residue on the page. Described by critics as among the finest examples of confessional verse in the English tradition, The Visit sits in conversation with the work of Robert Lowell while remaining wholly and distinctively Hamilton's own. For a poet who would later become celebrated as a formidable literary critic and biographer, this collection stands as a remarkable testament to what poetry can achieve when silence is as carefully measured as the words themselves — and the reader is left wondering how so few lines can carry such immense weight.