The Tears of Things (Madville Publishing 2025) by Catherine Hamrick is an exquisite, sensory-rich and sensitive body of poems that vividly capture with what it means to love, lose, fall, get up, and do it all again. Hamrick’s language is consistently vibrant, and often unique—for example, “slick-tripped” in a poem about winter ice entitled “Fat Tuesday Freeze.” Her deft use of meter makes these verses a delight to read—and to read out loud—as in “I’m tipsy to tuck a candy-striped camellia in my hair” from the poem “Before Dogwood Winter.” Hamrick employs alliteration with a smoothness all but sleight-of-hand in such lines as “the snaking neck / and strut and stalk / of a great blue heron” in her poem “Swimming After Trout.” Her nature descriptions are especially evocative and lush, conjuring deeper meanings from the natural world.
As her poems are often rooted in place, The Tears of Things is richly infused with genuine Southern touches. Readers will find a father bent to plant “Kentucky Wonders / before Good Friday thundered in the Appalachian foothills” in the opening poem “Iowa Dreams” as well as Chilton County, Alabama, peaches “heavy with juice / and russet-pink-orange, / like a sunset haze,” in the poem “Peach Heat: Out of Hand.”
Yet Hamrick’s poetic reach extends well beyond regional settings. These poems open into the universal, with images and situations that speak to the broader human condition. For example, the relatable modern curse of insomnia appears in “Second Chance Crack-up” with time measured as “three-and-a-half sleeping pills past 4 a.m.” And, in “Night of the Insistent Moon,” Hamrick writes this:
Nightly at nine o’clock, I dispensed benzos,
doling out haphazard naps until I swallowed
a hangover’s worth; meting out sleep
stops you from saving up for a dead end.
Equally moving are Hamrick’s explorations of family ties and their unraveling. The decline of the mother is a poignant recurring theme. This is the mother who “teaspooned chocolate chip dough / in same-size circles on scarred cookie sheets / and edited recipes in cookbook margins” in the poem “Origami Storm.” But then, she became the mother who “took to wearing her sweater / turned inside out and backwards…” by the close of the poem. This is also the mother who makes the daughter recall “the mirror cracked by my fist when Mom disappeared / with the car keys and forgot her address” in “Persimmon Surrender.” Ultimately “buried in blue” in the poem “Summer Contained,” she remains the mother who will cause the daughter to “mourn the questions never asked of my mother” in “Chattahoochee: Songs I Never Heard till Now.”
Counterbalancing this sorrow are poems that celebrate nature’s persistence and beauty as well as the magic of renewal. Nature, flowers, and fruits are the champions of several poems, including the tenacious bird in “House Finches” who with “warbles / jumping down the scale, as bright as his tomato-spattered cap… bathes in sunlight.” In “Apple Chill,” Hamrick evokes the sheer pleasure of eating an apple with her phrasing “the seed-dimpled slice / tartly chilled my mouth.” And in “Dwarf Iris Blessing,” the “Blue-violet tongues” of spring’s irises become “a green amen.”
Not surprisingly, the collection has drawn praise from other poets. In a review at the Alabama Writers Forum, former Alabama Poet Laureate Jennifer Horne had this to say of this refined, glorious collection:
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. …
…
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.
The title of this evocative collection comes from a poem entitled “Night of the Insistent Moon,” which ends with these two stanzas:
and I opened to the gaze of the shadow man,
as if tuning to the slow pull
of a sonorous cello tone, mellowing
to that ancient call—the tears of things.
This phrase, as explained by the author in her Notes, “derives from the Latin phrase sunt lacrimae rerum from Book I, line 462 of The Aeneid by Virgil.” As further explained, “Seamus Heaney’s interpretation of Aeneas’ explanation to a comrade—“there are tears at the heart of things”—speaks to the human capacity to know distress and sorrow while arriving at a place or condition of safety.” Thus, this collection is aptly named as it speaks to distress and sorrow, while ultimately arriving at a place of safety.
All in all, a splendid collection of poetry. Organized into five parts—Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall, plus “The Fifth Season,” the many poems in The Tears of Things are memorable, warm, relatable—and stunning.
Catherine Hamrick
A content strategist, copywriter, and editor at Berry College, Catherine Hamrick previously worked at Southern Living, Cooking Light, Southern Accents, Victoria, Better Homes and others. She also taught writing and communication arts at several colleges and universities. Her poetry has appeared in The Blue Mountain Review, Appalachian Places, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, storySouth, The Citron Review, and elsewhere. Find her online at catherinehamrick.com.
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