Pauline Hawkesworth

Pauline Hawkesworth, Bracken Women in Lime Trees (Indigo Dreams Press)

The best-selling poet in Portsmouth this week was Pauline Hawkesworth. People are unusually willing to part with £7.50 for a poetry book if given the right sort of opportunity and a launch event at St. Francis Church was the ideal way of outselling all other poets, none of whom would have had enough books on shelves in bookshops to compete.
Pauline read from the book at either end of an hour which included readings by Maggie Sawkins, Denise Bennett, Brian Wells, Mick Perryment and a varied and entertaining support cast from Portsmouth Poetry Society. The performers and the impressive size of the audience showed the Portsmouth Poetry Scene to be in a fine and healthy condition.
The moon and stars recur in the poems in Pauline’s book, sometimes in relation to domestic situations. There is something mystical not far below the surface of everyday experiences but it is not defined here and the poems are too well-grounded and practical for Pauline to be described as a ‘mystic’ or dubious ‘dream-weaver’. The poems are perhaps ‘in search of mysticism’ and use a language that is not over-written but accurately descriptive and at times captivating without being showy.
Thus dogs are as likely to be constellations as pets, if not both. There is an instinctive relationship between our worldly presence and wider, universal references, and quite arrestingly, in midwinter, we are shown
the earth finger-tipping
along the edge of her realm.

Sedna, the newly discovered minor planet beyond Pluto, is

small, a wren
caught on camera
in the oceans of space.

And, after images of space, it is oceans that come most readily to mind in these poems,
If he inspects her heart,
he will see an ocean moving

or,
the sea’s rim turning into gigantic hands.

The descriptive power of Pauline’s language and her perceptions are the most memorable features of the collection although perhaps the best poem for me is When She Left the Room, which reveals a dark underside to an apparently happy relationship.
The poem provides something unexpected and almost sinister.
We are often told that poetry should do the unexpected but if it did so all the time, the unexpected would soon become expected and so it can’t really win. Experimentation and daring innovation can be of great interest but doing the simple things well is never going to go out of fashion. But one word in this book took me more by surprise and provided more to think about than all the rest when in Venus in the Night Sky, the universe is described as ‘crowded’.
Of course, we know that the universe is unimaginably empty. So perhaps it is simply that on a starry night it looks densely packed. But in the context of this book, full of domestic comforts, a few terrors and the broad sweep of evocative imagery, an enquiry into the possibility of mysticism, the universe might be crowded with things that aren’t really there.