Rift by Forrest Hamer New York City:  Four Way Books, 2007;  58 pp.

Wilfred Bion said that he had died during World War I. In his early 20s, Bion had been the commander of a tank unit that was submerged in mud and surrounded by German soldiers. Having done everything that could be done to defend the unit, Bion chose to read poetry. The Germans killed all the men under Bion's command. Only Bion survived the slaughter.1

Bion's statement that he had died, spoken as if from the realm of a living afterlife, might be thought of as an act of necessary fiction — an attempt at reconciliation — counting himself among the dead in an effort to reconcile himself to the fact that he was among the living.

Reading poetry might have offered Bion the possibility of remaining alive to his circumstances even if the circumstances were unspeakably terrifying. We imagine Forrest Hamer wrote much of Rift (2007), his newest volume of poetry, as a declaration of consciousness in response to the primitive and horrifying details of slaughter and genocide in Africa. Even though Rift is an effort to reconcile himself with unspeakable horrors, Hamer sees that reconciliation is a fragile prospect at best, always on the verge of falling apart.

Throughout this exploration of rift and reconciliation in families, ethnic groups, and within our own minds, Hamer's voice remains dignified and unadorned, meditative rather than didactic. A psychoanalyst and an accomplished poet, Hamer does not try to convince or instruct us but is “offering consciousness a chance to recognize its predicaments, foreknow its capacities and rehearse its comebacks in all kinds of venturesome ways” (Heaney, 1995, p. 2).