Dim Time and History on a Garrison Clock

A Collection of Poetry

Margaret Benjamin Hammer

”This is modern poetry: its eye always open for the telling image, ear cocked to an internal music, and tongue ready to taste the tartness of irony…. These poems are not only thoughtful in an intellectual sense but in a compassionate one as well.

Peggy’s poems delve into the human condition and reach out to the animate world around us. In all, there is praise for the passing moment and a catching at it with the gossamer mesh of imagination.”

—Harry Thurston, poet and journalist, author of Against Darkness and Storm: Lighthouse, his latest book

Contents

• Foreword (Harry Thurston)
• Seeing Our Future Burn
• Haiku I
• Haiku II
• Haiku III
• Haiku IV
• Breakfast
• Origins
• That Mournful Middle C
• Fire at the Corner
• To the Auctioneer
• Signal Incomplete
• Recollection
• New York Suite: Small Hearts Beating Deep in the NIght in Central Park
• Challenge
• Foetal Space Trip
• Window-box Garden
• Two Words
• Shopping
• Rebound Release
• Autumn Afternoon, Inwood Park
• This is for Ernie
• Direct Light
• Geranium
• Delicacy, Strength
• $Hi
• Bus Ride, New York
• Lament of a Reluctant Coney Island Business Man
• Rainstorm in Puerto Rico
• High-Rise Mondrian
• A Moment out of Time
• Halifax-Dartmouth Suite: Dim Time and History on a Garrison Clock
• Calligraphy
• The Trouble with Dusting
• Duet
• Love and a Four-leaf Clover
• Suppertime
• Pilgrimage
• Nuptial Announcement
• Fog
• Eyes of the Unemployed
• Red-winged Sea Gull
• Ritual on Asphalt
• Baby on Board
• Jetsam
• Down by Tufts Cove
• A Policy of Drift
• Standing Silver in the Sun
• Respite
• Signs in the Snow
• Woman Hanging out the Wash
• The Spider and the Universe
• Lily on a Lake
• October Light

About the Author

Margaret Benjamin Hammer, born in Brookfield, Colchester County, Nova Scotia, attended Dalhousie University, Halifax, McGill University, Montreal, and the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University, New York, picking up the New York Newspaper Women’s Club Award en route. 

Her varied writing and editing career spanned many cities: New York, Toronto, Montreal, and Halifax. She now lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

Her work has appeared in a number of literary publications, and she received the poetry award in the Writer’s Federation of Nova Scotia Competition in 1990.