FAULKNER AUTHOR'S BOYHOOD IN POETRY; HAMBLIN'S BOOK A `JOURNEY OF SELF'

Like many fathers anxious to capture their family's stages of development in amber, Robert Hamblin made color slides of anniversaries and outings and vacations. The disconcerting problem, he said, was that photographs don't lie the way memories do.

He's not being facetious. "Memories...are not accurate or factual," Hamblin says, "but they're very precious."

So at the age of 30, he swapped his camera for a pen and journal.

"With poems," Hamblin says, "you not only can lie, you must lie."

An English professor at Southeast Missouri State University for the past 27 years, Hamblin is best known for co-authoring eight scholarly books on William Faulkner. He also is working on a biography of university basketball coach Ron Shumate.

But he has just published his first book of poetry, titled "From the Ground Up: Poems of One Southerner's Passage to Adulthood."

It is filled with Hamblin's memories of his boyhood in rural Mississippi, with epiphanies found in ordinary daily events, with the helpless hope of parenting, with his "search for transcendence."

The book's four-part design represents "the journey of the self," Hamblin says. The direction of the movement is outward into the world and also upward toward transcendence hence the book's title.

Growing up poor in a fundamentalist Baptist family, Hamblin's notions about the world were restricted. But his father, a farmer who had only a fourth-grade education, valued education.

Through education, Hamblin found there were other ways to look at the world. In college he encountered a science professor who was a Baptist deacon and an evolutionist.

"I always had the feeling there could not be a conflict between God and truth," he said. "...I had to find people who read the Bible differently."

Today, he is still a Baptist but also a humanist. He does not believe that is a contradiction. "Most people are searching for transcendence," he says. "If you're a humanist, you end up going full circle."

That circle, as some of his poetry suggests, led him not to some ideal but to the real. "You come back to Earth. It's in your present relationships; it's in the existential moment," he says.

Or, he puts it another way: "If we can't experience God in the here and now, we're not likely to experience God in the hereafter."

"Picking Strawberries," the poem which ends the book, urges readers to examine their everyday lives for the truths they may be missing. "You learn, after a while, that the best ones always lie close to the ground," the poem opens.

Though it began as a method of preserving memories, the practice of writing poetry also developed into a kind of therapy for Hamblin.

There's a reason why some of his childhood poems are written in the first person, some in the third person.

"For years I could not write about my childhood," Hamblin says. "It was only when I discovered I could cast it in the third person that I could deal with that."

There was a period of his life when he was ashamed of his father and of growing up in poverty.

"If you live long enough...it comes back around," Hamblin says. "Now I see his strength and his good qualities."

That is another theme in the poetry; the idea that the real heroes in our lives don't hawk basketball shoes on TV. They're often members of our family, people who are almost invisible to us.

His own parental trials expressed in the poems soothing his daughter's broken heart, his son going off to war, his prematurely-born grandchild reinforced his belief that "love is the solution for family problems and social problems and, I would even believe, world problems."

In parenthood, he said, "the surprise, in spite of the difficulties, was how sufficient love was to take care of these difficulties."

Much of this passage to adulthood is set in Cape Girardeau because Hamblin and his wife, Kaye, to whom the volume is dedicated, decided they loved it as home even while they were intending to leave. Another commonplace occurrence.

"People talk about how ordinary my poems are, and I don't have the feeling everyone means it as a compliment," Hamblin said.

"...My poetry is ordinary. If I have done it as well as I hope to...people will see that magic, that miraculousness in the everyday."

Hamblin contends that means not letting the facts get in the way of the truth. "There's a difference between facts and truth," he says. "Fiction is not factual but it is true."

Sometimes his wife, who saw the photographs develop, has to be reminded of that truth, Hamblin says.

"Sometimes my wife says, `That's not the way that happened.' I say, `That's the way it should have happened.'"

The book will be available soon at Books & Things in the University Student Center.