Saskia Hamilton (1967-2023)

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I’m writing this brief tribute to Saskia Hamilton a month before I will empty out her office, 401C Barnard Hall, which is itself a vivid portrait: thousands of books, Dutch tea, a reproduction of the Madonna del Parto, file cabinets stuffed with correspondence from literary luminaries, photos of her son. Saskia’s scholarship, which has made an inestimable contribution to the life of American letters, is shelved there, too, not far from her three collections of poetry. Her fourth, All Souls, was released in early September of this year.

Saskia’s generosity to other artists, students, scholars, and colleagues was matched by a work ethic seeded in kindness. She did not say no. I, perhaps like many of you reading this now, was often a recipient of this generosity, as are her readers, who encounter a body of work that acts as a “gateway to the place that is unreachable,” as she writes in “Slow Train.”

Saskia’s poems, which have earned her fellowships, accolades, and awards, are filled with images of landscapes both known and unknowable, with allusions drawn from her reading and from the erudite conversations she both listened to and engaged in with quiet wit and acumen. Her syntax unfolds with such music it approaches music even as it tracks the mind’s leaps and sudden fleeting apprehensions.

Because I shared Saskia’s office, I know firsthand how beloved she was by her colleagues. If I left the door open, a good proportion of the English Department would come knocking to say hello. In her 21 years at Barnard, Saskia taught poetry workshops and lectured on the history of lyric poetry and the art of the letter. In her last five years, she served as a vice provost, helping to guide the College through the tumult of the COVID-19 pandemic. She directed the Women Poets at Barnard reading series, which introduced hundreds of Barnard students to important contemporary poets. It was Saskia’s idea to have students introduce the guest readers; she helped students shape their introductions into homages that encouraged them to find their own voices.

To avoid burdening Saskia as she grew sicker, sometimes her students would send me letters they hoped would make it to Saskia at moments of relative ease. In one, Kap Taylor ’18CC, a former student of Saskia’s, wrote, “I am not 18 anymore, and you are no longer my beloved brilliant professor. You are still beloved and brilliant, just no longer my prof. You’re really everyone’s now. …”

In 2020, just a few months before Saskia was diagnosed with cancer, I interviewed her for this magazine. We spoke about her newly published book, The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle. The interview conveys Saskia’s integrity and sensitive ethics; it also outlines how she got from being a Kenyon English major to becoming one of the country’s most respected poets and editors.

Though examples of Saskia’s particular brilliance are not hard to find — you can come across them in her scholarship, poems, and the folders of notes I’ll soon be trying to organize for the archive at Yale University’s Beinecke Library — the interview makes them abundantly clear. “What moves you most in these letters?” I asked. Her answer: “Where is it that Yeats says that ‘words alone are certain good’? What moves me most in these letters [is the] clarity of expression set alongside the contradictions of feelings.”

It has been a great fortune for those of us here at Barnard who knew Saskia and for those of us from elsewhere — from her punk rock bandmates in D.C. to her Lannan Foundation co-workers — to be illuminated by her inimitable presence and song, which endure. “We wake from sleep to sleep,” she writes in All Souls, “[while] those emperors of speed, the swifts, stir in the south and make their way, sleeping above us, in the air.”