Michael Sutherlin reviews Daniel Gabriel’s Hamlet Figura in Grist: A Journal of The Literary Arts.
If you are looking for a cerebral investigation into the nature of language, Daniel Gabriel’s Hamlet Figura is for you. It is a single work divided into a series of 175 individual poems, each written in free verse and organized into two stanzas with five lines each. Despite the simple structure and prosaic language, this is not a collection that comports itself to skimming or exclusionary reading. As Gabriel states in his preface, the poem interprets Hamlet from the basis of two major premises: “that Hamlet is caught up with language as such, and that language in general creates world and is redemptive, whether or not the play represents this point of view.”
