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There
is a whispered playfulness about Christian Hawkey's first collection,
appropriately indicated by its whimsical cover illustration: a stuffed toy
duck teeters poignantly on the edge of a hotel bed, echoed by its back-cover
duck reflection in an impersonal dressing table mirror. This strange
repositioning of the urban and the everyday filters through Hawkey's poetry:
in a way it is the poetry, as the delicate sifting
process of the poet's wayward thinking forms the real fascination of his
writing.
Thoughts in 'The Book of Funnels' are lively, buzzing, cannot really be
owned: 'A thought drones in, trailing its landing gear' ( 'The Isle of
Monapia') - wasps, moths: perceptions flutter and are uttered, but each moves
mysteriously and of its own volition, 'as if it were someone else's and not
your own' ('Up Here in the Rafters Everything is Clear'). Yet this collection is far from
objective or anonymous - there is an insistently present narrator, and this
is what makes Hawkey's poetry such an interesting mix. In the vast majority
of the poems an 'I' speaks, in others there is a 'he'; very few are
'objective' and these few are sustained by the personal nuances of the rest.
I loved Hawkey's neologism 'whispercourse' ( in the 'funnels' section of the
book); it captures the lyrical way the poems work, as the connective
sidesteps of image, mood, word, create both fresh perspective (one of the
fundamental projects of poetry) and leave evidence of their own choreography.
'I negotiate/ a stream of particles' he writes in the same sequence,
seemingly endless but for the human presence of 'the red warmth of soft
breathing'.
Of course this method is probably easier to trace in the poems than describe
in prose! It has elements of classic stream-of-consciousness, but also of
poetry's resonant, clear-cut phrasing: Hawkey finds his own forms but is
generally loyal to their architecture. More often it is in permutations of
phrasing that ideas float and mutate. 'I Return to the O's in Oblivion', for
example, is a beautifully sculpted poem, starting from an abstract premise
but ending in a touchingly bizarre humanity 'large man/ in a white dress,
soaking up the moon./ Nights I took down, gently, and put on./ White moon
soaking in the backyard'. The poem tracks impulses to embody and release, and
the interplay between the cerebral and the visceral: 'His aorta pulsed. His
mind pulsed back'. The 'O' is zero, nothing; is an exclamation of wonder, and
then becomes the white reflective disc of the moon.
These poems are both baffling and entrancing: I particularly liked 'Slow
Waltz Through Inflatable Landscape', with its sense of journey and
ineluctable companionship. In many, the sense of identity is very fluid and
somewhat lonely. The occasional poem - 'Note Left Behind on a Table' 'Secret
Ministry' - evokes a personal
relationship, though in these too there is an exploration of incomprehension,
of absence. Although there are some cultural references - Goya, John Clare
- for the most part Hawkey's writing is an organic, self-generated process:
intriguing
and original; but also good humoured and open enough to invite you in for
further reflection.
© Sarah Law 2005
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