Musings: Poems for Myself

Read the poems in Musings and you’ll meet Bob Hamblin the man in full. The man who, as Steve Martin once said, knows a thing or two about a thing or two. Knows the name of things, the ways of things, how each particular is a portal into the larger matters of love and loss, life and death, getting up and being down, weaves them all together into whole cloth, or unravels the weaving to discover the materials themselves. –Charles A. Peek, poet, author of Breezes on Their Way to Being Winds

Robert Hamblin’s Musings: Poems for Myself is a joy to read. Hamblin’s attentions to the world around him offer wonderful gifts, in an impressive directness of language and thought. We find here a loving, and sometimes beautifully sorrowful, embrace of the everyday; but mostly these poems are about the passage of life from day to night and back to day again and from one season to the next. –Joseph Stanton, author of Lifelines: Poems for Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper

These poems are relatable reflections that plumb the depths of Hamblin’s emotions, relationships, and thoughtful ponderings on life. He places you squarely in his neighborhood and invites you to join him for a pensive but pleasing afternoon on the porch, spent mulling everything from gardening to universal ethics. While there’s an easy eloquence to Hamblin’s writing, there’s also a lyricism reminiscent of Yeats and Wordsworth. I liken this quality to “umami” — at once earthy and sublime.—Sheri Vandermolen, author of Jasmine Fractals: Poems of Urban India and editor of The Complete Poems of Louis Daniel Brodsky