Mid-Missouri poet Justin Hamm's new book raises a Guinness to Midwest life
In a manner becoming his Midwestern upbringing, Justin Hamm's latest collection presents many sides and scenes of the poet as humble public servant.
Often, Hamm takes up pen and plow as a poet-farmer. He pauses to notice shifting weather; stays in physical touch with the plots of land many consign to memories and rearview mirrors; tills soil for language enough to capture common experience.
As a poet-journalist, Hamm chronicles the passage of time — and its oft-weathering, sometimes-refining effect on the people, places and things he holds close.
And the mid-Missouri writer fulfills the priestly function of a poet: modeling confession, and convening a wake for moments which naturally slip through our fingers. This ideal is reflected in the book's title — "Drinking Guinness With the Dead" — but Hamm isn't only concerned with the dearly departed.
He pays honor due days and nights which impress themselves upon our hearts, children who grow tall and stand firm like trees, and the twinned acts of writing and preserving.
The spirit and substance of the collection, gathering new and selected poems written from 2007 to 2021, came to Hamm during pandemic nights when he was alone yet never lonely, he writes in a foreword.
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"Sometimes, late at night, the Guinness might tell me to look back through old family photos. To write to friends I missed," he writes. "To stream episodes of M*A*S*H or highlights from 80s baseball games. And, eventually, to reread my first three books of poetry."
"Drinking Guinness With the Dead" keeps vigil with those old friends while setting out folding chairs for new company. Thanks to his abiding covenant with the form, Hamm is free to represent the poet at work. Unfolding over nearly 15 years, these verses take all the time they need, encouraging readers to sit up with them and do likewise.
Starting with a 'thank you'
The book opens with new work, and words of thanks. In "Gratitude for the Poets," Hamm tips a wide-brimmed hat to forerunners and peers. Appreciating their words, little miracles made of syllables which free us to appreciate what's hidden in plain sight, he adds welcome entries to the canon:
"Thank you for Wednesday night church / and all fifty-two ways light can fall upon a leaf."
Throughout the poem, he gives thanks for the community poets create, adding his "Amen" with hands folded: "Thank you, poets, for giving / love its own language. / Thank you for giving language. / Thank you for giving love."
The collection houses an abundance of images and individual lines that will stick as memories. Hamm venerates the humble "Shower Beer" with verse worthy of a natural wonder:
"Press to each temple / for a ten count / then crack open / and slowly sip / beneath the rain / like gentle flames / crawling across the flesh map / of tectonic tension / we call neck / and shoulders / and back."
Across the pages, Hamm's speakers encounter a gas-station stranger who "Says he wrote quite a few / of John Denver's early songs"; promise a ghost "I will keep my sad words / in a pocket with a button"; and face "The Third Day of Winter" where "Snow blows across the alfalfa bales, / across the hood of the forgotten Nova."
In "The Reason," his speaker considers "the loneliest bull elk / left in America," then brings his witness home, putting himself in a lonely, hoof-worn place.
"Me—I saw myself precisely / as I would be if I ever / lost you or those babies. / Uncertainty of movement. / Afloat in a field of nothing. / Almost too much effort / even to lift my thorny head."
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Some moments might find their twin somewhere else, but read like they could only happen in Missouri. Hamm presses his stamp hard into the spiritual ink pad with the opening lines of "Waltzing Toward Hospice":
"In the brief silence between summer storms / 'The Missouri Waltz' sobs from the speakers / of a slow-idling van."
"Storm, Rural Missouri" keeps company with "time-crumpled angels" who "pull on their Carhartt robes" and who intuit that "Here, every storm is forty nights / from stating the profound."
Outside a specific time or place, other proverbs will provoke breathless assent from anyone running on Central Standard Time: "Of all things holy, barn is holiest" ("Last Lesson in Ruin") and "Rust, you are a Heartland / impressionist painter" ("Rustsong") ring especially true.
'The clocks continue'
Hamm is at his best when chasing time, creating a taxonomy of all its changes. Sometimes his words are tender, dewy-eyed; at others, he's no less artful for remaining matter-of-fact.
"Dali had it wrong. / The years melt," he writes in "Photograph," a new poem on early pages. "The clocks continue, / brutal as prison guards."
"Drinking Guinness With the Dead During a Pandemic," which inspired the book's title, orients the living to their place.
"The world ... remains the world," Hamm writes. "You are in it, for now. You get the feeling the dead appreciate / your silence. After all, who are you to demand to know / if the eye of God is anything more than the shape of an / open flower?"
Hamm's poems regularly regard his elders, who are not to be easily mocked or beatified. They are fleshy, unreliable narrators just like the rest of us — only they've seen more days, felt more miles, known more heartbeats.
"Sometimes, in the good old films," honors a certain kind of man — the hard-luck handsome, pulling toward some semblance of home. "This poem is for / those men. / And it comes with / a can of Coors," Hamm writes.
In "The Farmers at Their Morning Coffee," he eavesdrops on "old flood stories / to rival Gilgamesh or the Bible." His farmers tend to circle the same conclusion: "Things are always just a little / bit worse than they were / this time yesterday morning."
And "Old Men Laughing on a Park Bench in Early October" observes the quiet magic passed between old friends. "The inner wells from which they draw their / joy must be deeper than any I've witnessed in my short / life," Hamm's speaker whispers to us, daring himself not to break the spell.
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Poems like these reverberate with Hamm's clear belief that we exist uniquely, as bundles of our own experience — we would not be ourselves without the people, places, clouds, conversations and cups of coffee that make up day after day of this one life we lead.
That's why "Drinking Guinness With the Dead" should also end with a word of thanks, murmured by the reader in Hamm's direction. There is something special about sitting at a poet's feet to glean 15 years of daily wonder. Readers will notice how Hamm changes, how he becomes more himself across these pages. He documents the momentary; we reap a greater harvest.
"Drinking Guinness With the Dead" is available via Kansas City-based Spartan Press. Learn more about Hamm's work at https://justinhamm.net/.
Aarik Danielsen is the features and culture editor for the Tribune. Contact him at adanielsen@columbiatribune.com or by calling 573-815-1731. Find him on Twitter @aarikdanielsen.
This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: Mid-Missouri poet Justin Hamm's new book toasts Midwest life
