The leaf-ride  Dinah Hawken (VUP 2011) ISBN 9780864736505

Heidi North

The leaf-ride is Dinah Hawken's fifth book of poetry. By an accomplished poet, this collection explores quite a range of the human condition, "...the drift/ - I want to be held alive/ in a down-welling, up-welling drift."

From the pleasure and delight of a newly born child to the power and play of language; through the atrocities of war and a lament on our own failings, she leads off on a journey through this "leaf-ride of suffering and joy."

I have long been a fan of the way Hawken has of noticing and defining the natural world. And this collection is taut with her characteristic use of imagery and ability to capture exquisite details. For example, in 16 tiny poems ‘Tulips':

            memento petals
in a small brown bowl
            waving

But what is also lovely about this careful deliberation that underpins her work are the bursts of ‘wild joy' that come through in this collection. To me, this is when Hawken's poetry is at its strongest; it's elegant, but there is a real sense of fun. I particularly enjoyed ‘Building sonnets', where she enters the mysterious world of building through language, her toolbox, so to speak:

It was lifted
off the truck by a black and orange
winch and winch was my beginning
in the coloured world.

Until even the builder is making language quips, which is a lovely bridge to weave us back and forward across the ordinary world until the act of renovating and building becomes "the frame of bones we are alive on.../ the hard shape of a renovated room/ in which a newborn child might lie".

The artful lightness these poems embody is when her poetry really comes alive and sings. The sequence about her granddaughter Elza is also full of delight. The last segment in the collection, it's a nice place to leave us, with a child on the edge of seeking out her own "leaf-ride".

The ‘Peace on Earth' series, which was commissioned to accompany a performance of Haydn's ‘Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross', takes on the big and terrifying theme with Hawken's gentle grace and attention to detail, which saves it from becoming hyperbolic or clichéd and instead is infused with beauty and tenderness -  no mean feat.

I must admit I was vaguely frustrated by the contemplative sequence ‘Trying to conjure up someone like you by reading Rumi and Italo Calvino beside lake Geneva after a visit to Turkey' because I was never quite sure who the "you" was. There is a strong political undercurrent on the horror of war running through, but I felt that this sequence wasn't quite as accessible as the rest of the work.

However, in some of the other political poems, when her characteristic gentle grace becomes direct and startling, the effect can be gut wrenching. In ‘Where are the girls':

I can take the side
of the woman who sits
head down and hands empty
at the side of her burnt baby.

It is no surprise that Hawken is a psychotherapist and has a history of working with the mentally ill and homeless. The collection is infused with compassion, but also the anguish of what we are capable of:

Oh mother, forgive us. Because
we are soft, we become
too hard and then we do not know
what we do.

The leaf-ride is a skilfully crafted collection that left me with a sense of beauty and hope. It's a work to come back to, and to treasure.

NZPS Home