News at Eleven: The "you" of the poems, however,

is quite another pronoun. The reader is never addressed directly in them, merely permitted to hear, or to overhear, the poet talking to some second person whose identity is not revealed but whom one can, more often than not, assume to be either the poet's father or his first wife. [Ian] Hamilton was thirteen years old when his father died and his first marriage was blighted by his wife's protracted mental illness, and these experiences supply the subject matter for much of his oeuvre. In both biographical instances, Hamilton found himself in the position of caring but impotent witness to another's suffering, and it is this anguished predicament that his best poems powerfully register.

from The Times Literary Supplement: You and Ian Hamilton

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