Justin Hamm, Drinking Guinness With The Dead (Spartan Press, 2022) 163 pages, poetry, $15.00. At Amazon.
Justin Hamm presents us with a selection of his poems from 2007 through 2021 in this amusingly titled volume. While Hamm is strongly based in the American mid-west (he lives in Mark Twain territory), he proves himself to be a strong poet of place wherever he is writing from. Even poems that address relationships and inner child work are firmly grounded in earth and to specific locations.
"The air in this place/ is ripe/ with some kind/ of weather."- from "Ohio County, Kentucky, 1985".
"They come from the mountain, he says,/ Their faces cold as the moon's." from "Stranger at the Only Fueling Station in Kingston, Arkansas".
"a night train torches/ through the dark stomach/ of the prairie" from "A Moment in Kansas"
Hamm is a man walking the planet and keenly aware of roots, of ground, of river, of tree-sway, of time, of turning-turning-turning in outerspace at all times. He never loses sight of it. He has a connectedness to all the moving machinery of nature and reminds us that it is machinery. He raises a toast to it - to history, to place, to time, to people past and present - and passes us the pint.
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