Poetry review – NUDE AGAINST A ROCK: John Forth admires Robert Hamberger’s ability to convey both joy and pain during his exploration of human vulnerability
Nude Against a Rock
Robert Hamberger
Waterloo Press
ISBN 9 7871 915 241177
100pp £12
Robert Hamberger’s fifth book is a sandwich: the rich filling comprises forty-odd poems revisiting themes made familiar in his earlier Blue Wallpaper. The opening section (“My Husband Sings”) is mainly fourteen-liners, seventeen of them to be exact, three of which make up a manifesto called “Love Song For a Bigot” while the rest of the group present a year in the life of a marriage. The big finale (28 poems inspired by Keith Vaughan’s Journals and paintings) includes the title poem “Nude Against a Rock” which itself goes a long way to defining the collection: ‘This man rises like a vulnerable answer’. And Keith Vaughan’s journals provide an epigraph for the sequence, as if to make sure nothing’s missed from an extended set of fairly resistant rocks:
As society becomes more cramping so the art of individuals burns with a brighter
and more feverish flame.
Keith Vaughan Journals, 4th March, 1944
Eighty years on we might be less sure about the intensity of artistic response to a cramped society, but there is a kind of feverish, vulnerable assertiveness throughout this sequence, rounding off a book which won’t give up on its own complexities. The second section had started by revisiting The New Poetry as an autobiographical marker of where the poet’s approach to his work began, first with close reference to the art on its cover and thereafter to the poems:
Flames catch your hand when Plath calls her skin
a Nazi lampshade. Lowell speaks of a mind
not right…
(“On First Looking into Alvarez’s New Poetry”)
There’s a notable London Magazine prize-winning poem “Funny Girl” that plays wittily with some memories of a childhood visit to the cinema (‘I watch with my mother…sitting silent in my singed and secret dark’) by exploring the feelings of a conflicted pre-adolescent towards both Omar Sharif and Barbra Streisand:
When no one’s watching I risk being
woman and man, wriggle between their
voices, blur between their smoky gaze…
A form of ventriloquism, this chameleon-like adoption of differing points of view within a poem is something Hamberger has fine-tuned to produce fluid dramas. At times an almost matter-of-fact narrator slides unannounced into a dreamlike other-worldly consciousness and then back again to end on an appraisal of a fragmented world by a single voice. This happens in “Red Door”, a poem in which everyday logic blends with the colourful response of a mother suffering from dementia. The result is a shortcut to contrary visions presented as one. A similar sleight-of-hand is evident in the title poem of the middle section “Anything in the World” which sets limits or boundaries for what a grandfather can expect before moving outward towards infinite possibility:
Your weariness means this strange man lifts
you in his arms before he disappears,
coming and going like waves minutes years.
It’s one of a pair of sonnets that attempt to come to terms with the unknowable. The other, “Sleeping with Uncertainty”, enacts an extraordinary tussle with night-thoughts:
You sleep with uncertainty – that familiar
companion – never guessing when he’ll go…
and then proceeds to act out a conflict of disturbed sleep-patterns and general unease:
You doze on tenterhooks. Your pillows know
his coming or going is the breath of a liar.
Both poems celebrate a brief respite which is no less triumphant for being brief. I did wonder, however, if the seventeen-sonnet-majority in section one followed by another twenty-seven unrhymed sonnets scattered among the forty-odd poems of the middle section might have been better presented in sequences rather than having us stumble upon apparently random sonnets among the foliage.
The final section, 28 poems in tribute to Keith Vaughan, is arguably where form and voice take flight. The journals clearly reveal a troubled soul, beginning in war and ending in suicide. One of the ‘war’ poems struggles to confront the horror of leave-taking with one who will soon be killed, even as it captures something of it at the entrance to Trafalgar Square tube station:
Might he feel reluctance to return?
Pigeons scatter – a blather of wings,
bellies and beaks. He sways
among them, source of their flight,
each bird’s confusion a panicky feather
that ascends, like his breath, into sky.
(“Lazarus”)
Vaughan, in “Painter’s Progress”(August, 1958), had wanted his “Nude Against a Rock” to symbolise man’s ‘aspirations and reactions to the life of his time’ and so his ‘voice’ in the title poem concludes:
I’ll balance my final touches
with a truce – each leaning on the other.
Twenty years later, in one of the last journals (8th September, 1977) a line of poetry leaps out from the prose: ‘I thought in bed last night about Boulanger’. It’s answered by Vaughan / Hamberger’s voice commemorating a war death:
Adieu to the drowsy youth,
his arm flung back in dreams.
My kisses fail to wake him –
this skitter of moths across skin.
Thirty years gone, still warm
between sheets, I swim there again –
his nipples the sheen from oyster-shells,
his navel mother-of-pearl.
He is pebbles and breadcrumbs.
I can’t cup his charred gifts
in my hand, or forget his eyes.
(“Horizontal Figure”)
Echoes are everywhere. The unmistakable air of Owen’s “Futility”, though far less explicit, may spring to mind. Throughout, Hamberger’s fragmentary homages to a husband, to friends lost too soon, to the poet’s mother, to the life-giving love and vitality of children and, ultimately, to Art itself, explore a sensuous vulnerability that is by turns joyful and painful to witness.
Apr 16 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Robert Hamberger
Poetry review – NUDE AGAINST A ROCK: John Forth admires Robert Hamberger’s ability to convey both joy and pain during his exploration of human vulnerability
Robert Hamberger’s fifth book is a sandwich: the rich filling comprises forty-odd poems revisiting themes made familiar in his earlier Blue Wallpaper. The opening section (“My Husband Sings”) is mainly fourteen-liners, seventeen of them to be exact, three of which make up a manifesto called “Love Song For a Bigot” while the rest of the group present a year in the life of a marriage. The big finale (28 poems inspired by Keith Vaughan’s Journals and paintings) includes the title poem “Nude Against a Rock” which itself goes a long way to defining the collection: ‘This man rises like a vulnerable answer’. And Keith Vaughan’s journals provide an epigraph for the sequence, as if to make sure nothing’s missed from an extended set of fairly resistant rocks:
and more feverish flame. Keith Vaughan Journals, 4th March, 1944Eighty years on we might be less sure about the intensity of artistic response to a cramped society, but there is a kind of feverish, vulnerable assertiveness throughout this sequence, rounding off a book which won’t give up on its own complexities. The second section had started by revisiting The New Poetry as an autobiographical marker of where the poet’s approach to his work began, first with close reference to the art on its cover and thereafter to the poems:
Flames catch your hand when Plath calls her skin a Nazi lampshade. Lowell speaks of a mind not right… (“On First Looking into Alvarez’s New Poetry”)There’s a notable London Magazine prize-winning poem “Funny Girl” that plays wittily with some memories of a childhood visit to the cinema (‘I watch with my mother…sitting silent in my singed and secret dark’) by exploring the feelings of a conflicted pre-adolescent towards both Omar Sharif and Barbra Streisand:
A form of ventriloquism, this chameleon-like adoption of differing points of view within a poem is something Hamberger has fine-tuned to produce fluid dramas. At times an almost matter-of-fact narrator slides unannounced into a dreamlike other-worldly consciousness and then back again to end on an appraisal of a fragmented world by a single voice. This happens in “Red Door”, a poem in which everyday logic blends with the colourful response of a mother suffering from dementia. The result is a shortcut to contrary visions presented as one. A similar sleight-of-hand is evident in the title poem of the middle section “Anything in the World” which sets limits or boundaries for what a grandfather can expect before moving outward towards infinite possibility:
It’s one of a pair of sonnets that attempt to come to terms with the unknowable. The other, “Sleeping with Uncertainty”, enacts an extraordinary tussle with night-thoughts:
and then proceeds to act out a conflict of disturbed sleep-patterns and general unease:
Both poems celebrate a brief respite which is no less triumphant for being brief. I did wonder, however, if the seventeen-sonnet-majority in section one followed by another twenty-seven unrhymed sonnets scattered among the forty-odd poems of the middle section might have been better presented in sequences rather than having us stumble upon apparently random sonnets among the foliage.
The final section, 28 poems in tribute to Keith Vaughan, is arguably where form and voice take flight. The journals clearly reveal a troubled soul, beginning in war and ending in suicide. One of the ‘war’ poems struggles to confront the horror of leave-taking with one who will soon be killed, even as it captures something of it at the entrance to Trafalgar Square tube station:
Might he feel reluctance to return? Pigeons scatter – a blather of wings, bellies and beaks. He sways among them, source of their flight, each bird’s confusion a panicky feather that ascends, like his breath, into sky. (“Lazarus”)Vaughan, in “Painter’s Progress”(August, 1958), had wanted his “Nude Against a Rock” to symbolise man’s ‘aspirations and reactions to the life of his time’ and so his ‘voice’ in the title poem concludes:
Twenty years later, in one of the last journals (8th September, 1977) a line of poetry leaps out from the prose: ‘I thought in bed last night about Boulanger’. It’s answered by Vaughan / Hamberger’s voice commemorating a war death:
Adieu to the drowsy youth, his arm flung back in dreams. My kisses fail to wake him – this skitter of moths across skin. Thirty years gone, still warm between sheets, I swim there again – his nipples the sheen from oyster-shells, his navel mother-of-pearl. He is pebbles and breadcrumbs. I can’t cup his charred gifts in my hand, or forget his eyes. (“Horizontal Figure”)Echoes are everywhere. The unmistakable air of Owen’s “Futility”, though far less explicit, may spring to mind. Throughout, Hamberger’s fragmentary homages to a husband, to friends lost too soon, to the poet’s mother, to the life-giving love and vitality of children and, ultimately, to Art itself, explore a sensuous vulnerability that is by turns joyful and painful to witness.