Presented to: Pamela Porter Hamblin
For: "Magi"
Pamela Hamblin combines an easy-flowing vernacular diction with common images, the language of everyday speech with figures so commonplace that they seem to rise of their own accord from the subject. But by the end of her poem "Magi" they build up to an uncommon and surprisingly acute penetration into an interpretation we had not thought of, had not seen coming--and yet one so apt and true that we berate ourselves for not having seen it from the start, because the clues were in plain sight like signboards. The conclusion comes truly with "The Shock of Recognition"; we know it is true when confronted with it, but lacked the courage to face the wrenching needed to pry us out of our pleasant ruts. The poem hammers home that out of the familiar story of the birth at Bethlehem and the death at Calvary springs a painful and unfamiliar birth and death for each of us: the death of an old and sterile way of life and the birth of a new way that demands a contrition that "will break our hearts" (the words the poem ends with). The poem has an easiness of tone that leads us comfortably to a density that is shockingly uncomfortable. "Magi" is all that a poem should be.