SOURCE: Potts, Robert. “A Passionate Partisan.” New Statesman 131, no. 458 (1 April 2002): 51-2.

In the following review, Potts describes Hamilton's Against Oblivion as light entertainment lacking in serious thought.

When one considers how much of English poetry, from Anglo-Saxon onwards, is about transience—about how all things fade and are forgotten in time—and that many poems are (rarely confident) attempts simply to slow that journey to irrevocable oblivion, one might conclude that its lessons have been lost most often on poets themselves. Many poets desire, secretly or not, fame, remuneration or posterity; and the omnivorous desire all three. Few will enjoy even one of these rewards. And here we might consider, as the sharper-elbowed bards clearly do not, that the ethic we should associate with poetry—a lack of egotism; a painful sympathy for the common plight of common humanity; revulsion at the human cost of commerce; a concern...