#dinah hawken

[pairedaeza]

...here, in Paekākāriki, outside my window the Tasman Sea, moon-bound, rises and falls. It breaks up on the sea wall and falls.

Dinah Hawken, from 'The uprising'. Published in No Other Place to Stand: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand.

[theroadtoelle]

Dinah Hawken

I discovered Dinah Hawken while doing a challenge on Writing.com.

Dinah was born in New Zealand in 1943 and she spent a number of years living in the United States, working with the homeless and mentally ill. Her poems speak of her experiences, but also often have a focus on women’s issues. She has had a number of books published.

And although a poem

can enclose you

like the rocky arms

of a…

[bookandcover]

Balance, Dinah Hawken

1  

I had just chosen this theme when the global situation suddenly deteriorated. The whole gang started moving in — the Cubans, the Syrians, the terrorists, the big boys, of course, toying with their accumulated ammunition. I backed down into a thin, very beautiful woman, willing to offer anything they wanted — a miniature daffodil, some sort of love, to accommodate the blunt end of their strategies, plans, a glove —

when a quiet and terrifying poet, Adrienne Rich, stepped in. She stood there with an M16 at her back. I lay dreadfully apart on the carpet. Then her voice began unfolding like layered rock in the afternoon sun, precision glancing off, in striking bands, and it was clear that she offered me a future — a precarious one, with a constantly human body and two huge wings. And I remembered what they planned to hack from our dark gently breathing lands.

2

So I take hold of this poem which has come from the front. From the newspaper. From a narrow crack in a stack of exploded concrete. From the hand of a paratrooper, reaching out through the crack to a friend, in Lebanon. From the voice of a marine, pleading under collapsed stories of man-made rock, ‘Don’t leave me here.’ And what I ask from far below my own life, as the rescue work goes on, and what we must know in this time of crisis, yes, and grief, hunching towards the best, most ambitious dead end of all, is where are the women, where exactly are we?

3

We have been watching here for years, and we know, that power split from the source of its own body and breath is of a mind to divide everything else on earth, even the simplest thing, for a brief desperate show of brilliance; and that we, crouched, still, in the hills of our bodies, are most needed when we are most revolted. And we don’t know, living as we do in the decadence of division, whether we can stand binding love into this accuracy, and if we do, whether we can hold it there.

From It Has No Sound and Is Blue by Dinah Hawken 

(Victoria University Press, 1987)

[bibliomancyoracle]

and hold it, at the height of your heart

and give it your full attention, give it every chance

to be seen and heard, give yourself over

to an act of motherhood,

give this child a name

*

from "The Dream Child" by Dinah Hawken

[bookandcover]

I read this book of poems by New Zealand poet Dinah Hawken on the recommendation of one of my students. While in New Zealand, I want to become better acquainted with the writers of New Zealand. What’s happening in New Zealand poetry today? Who has shaped the poetic voice, the collective poetic conscience, of this country over the last century? Sadly, I haven’t (yet) read many New Zealand writers, but I have received so many compelling recommendations, so I’ll be working on it! 

This is an impressive set of poems, and one that resonated personally with me. Hawken crafted this book during three years in which she lived in New York City. Many of these poems deal with the sensation of displacement and distance, with the awareness of a home, friends, relatives, and well-known places in another hemisphere. She contemplates their summer during her winter and the reverse. I did the same move, but in the opposite direction, and I deeply related to her feelings about this move, and her articulate expression of these feelings in her poems. 

Hawken’s command of language is strong, her voice confident. Her work did not strike me as distinctly different than the type of precise writing generated by many contemporary American poets. Is she uniquely American among the New Zealand poets, and therefore familiar? She did spend a significant amount of time writing in the States? I will need to read more New Zealand poetry to have any hope of characterizing it. 

Thematically, Hawken’s poems have a global awareness, which I loved. She seems able to move seamlessly from the horrors of the international landscape to the intimacy of a single tree she examines. The anxieties she captures in her poems are deeply personal and highly relatable. She is concerned with the lives of homeless Americans, with the politicalization of race and sexuality in American, with women’s roles and rights and self-expression. She dreams of being hunted by armed men in uniforms. Her poems include the US’s nuclear tests and arms race with the USSR, the death of a young gay Black man (Stephen Hill), and the unalterable advance of the seasons. This is a speaker who fluctuates between horrified witness and inexplicable hope, between fear of her fellow man and quiet love for the mundane in human lives. These juxtapositions add weight, power, and complexity to her work, which is peppered with language moments of true beauty. 

“If there’s a knack to juggling attachment and detachment, I’m writing to you trying to find it.”  ~ Dinah Hawken

Image: book cover, Victoria University Press, 1987

[bibliomancyoracle]

You might see

the old shack

where the fucker still lives.

*

from "Thinking about Forgiveness" by Dinah Hawken