The Tears of Things

The Tears of Things 

By Catherine Hamrick 

Madville Publishing, 2025 

Paperback: $19.95 

Genre: Poetry 

Reviewed by Jennifer Horne 

Catherine Hamrick draws her book’s title from classical literature: a phrase in Homer’s Aeneid that, translated by Seamus Heaney, reads, “there are tears at the heart of things.” A more recent version of that sentiment occurs in the television show The Good Place, when the character Eleanor Shellstrop tells an immortal being horrified by the idea of death, “All humans are aware of death. So…we’re all a little bit sad, all the time. That’s just the deal.” Until someone figures out how to live forever (and please don’t let it be as a disembodied head, or as the result of extreme fasting), we humans will be trying to find joy, meaning, and connection in our relatively brief time on earth. One of our best ways to do that is through poetry.  

The Tears of Things is a first book that reads like the work of an accomplished, established poet. Artfully crafted poems address aging, mortality, and rebirth; grief, depression, and the return of joy; and the loss of romantic love and the possibility of loving again.  

Hamrick employs one of the traditional ways of organizing a book of poems, with four sections corresponding to the four seasons, beginning with Winter, but she exercises the human, imaginative privilege of adding a fifth season in which “we hold on, / / adding days to life’s brief sum before surrendering / to the glitter of tesserae seas and gold-hammered birds.” 

Narrative elements propel the course of the book: a midwestern winter, severe depression, the end of a marriage, the flight to sunnier and warmer territory; the loss of one’s parents and finding comfort in remembered family traditions; establishing a new phase of life that includes the pleasures of the natural world, meditation, art, and new friendships. The narrative is not the point, so much, though, as the lyrical and cyclical nature of Hamrick’s vision. In “Coneflower Sequence,” “Seed heads bristle symmetry.” In “Dwarf Iris Blessing,” the flowers provide “a green amen.” Seasons return and repeat, but never exactly the same way twice, and lyric precision is one way to capture the moment, not by stopping time but by honoring the awareness it imposes.  

Hamrick’s descriptive abilities and use of sound devices are impressive and pleasurable while keeping focus on what the language points to, rather than the words themselves. (You notice the paint strokes, but it’s the picture that comes through.) A few examples: “peonies flirted in ruffled skirts” (“Iowa Dreams”),  “A storm lumbers and rolls, / like an animal turning / out of a long sleep” (“Before Dogwood Winter”), “the snaking neck / and strut and stalk / of a great blue heron” (“Swimming After Trout”). In “Autumn Coda, Winter Wondering, ” she writes about how “I skip the florist for the forest floor.” One senses both Heaney and Yeats are on the poet’s bookshelves, and this poet has learned from the masters while making the language and syntax her own.  

In just a few places, I wished for slightly less descriptive list-making à la Carolyn Forché— “the aroma mélange block after block . . . / cayenne, paprika, cumin, garlic, coffee, / tobacco, incense, …” in “When You Need A Chat With Jesus”—but another reader might just as easily glory in such an abundance of items or the lushness of the lines “Umber splotches rosy dogwood leaves, and birds snatch at candy-berry clusters” in “Blue Ridge Weather Report.” 

The richness of imagery and sound is enhanced by innovative, invented verb forms: a speaker says she “slick-tripped” on icy rocks (“Fat Tuesday Freeze”), describes how her mother “teaspooned chocolate chip dough” (“Origami Storm”), addresses a caregiving friend whose “days fracture / / into chores” (“When You Need a Chat with Jesus”).  

Life should not be rushed through, nor should these poems. While varying in form and length, each offers a moment of consciousness, a window into a psyche in the process of change and growth, a determined valuing of this gorgeous, heartbreaking world.  

Jennifer Horne served as the twelfth Poet Laureate of Alabama, 2017-2021. The author of six books, most recently Letters to Little Rock: Poems, and a biography, Odyssey of a Wandering Mind: The Strange Tale of Sara Mayfield, Author, she has also edited five volumes of poetry, essays, and stories.