Steam-Cleaning Love

Lisa A. Dickson is a freelance writer living in Guelph, Ontario.

Exploring the inner landscape of desire and loss, the poems in this
collection are nevertheless ecstatic, moving outward into this network
of relationships and into the natural world, which responds with
sympathetic growth and decay. Again and again, the garden is invoked as
an emblem of both loss and the joy of discovery. In “Barbara’s
Garden,” the garden is a lasting signature of the dead woman and the
focus of the bereaved lover’s grief and solitude: “Waking, not
certain it was waking. In Barbara’s garden / your hasp of hunger
opened, closed, opened.” The speaker of “Equinox” tells us, “I
harvested five gardens this year, one orchard / and you.” Here the
slowly maturing garden and the putting up of preserves become metaphors
for the growth of love between women. In “I Love You Wildly,” the
natural world responds with a kind of mythic, sympathetic magic, where
love from “my green heart” winds like vines around the loved one’s
ankles.

Hamilton’s poems cover a broad emotional range, from the tenderness
and nostalgia of the first section to the anger and disappointment of
the last. Running through them all is passion, expressed in a sensual
voice that rejoices in the possibilities of sex and love and life within
a community of women.