Pauline Hawkesworth, Life-Savers on All Sides (Indigo Dreams)
Pauline
Hawkesworth’s new pamphlet arrives as a result of success in the Indigo Dreams
pamphlet competition. Her work has appeared in many places over the years but
there was a long gap between her first published collection, Dust and Dew (1969) and the more recent
opportunities to have her poems together in one book.
If
some poems aspire to the condition of music, Pauline is a visual poet, one of
observation, and more like a painter. Her language never reaches, or needs to
reach, for anything extravagant. She is never going to be undone by trying too
hard or straining for effect.
In
They Will Come, which does a great
deal in its seven lines, puddles join together to become seas,
and the shapes
of drowned
fishermen
float to the
surface.
In
so few, economical lines we have moved from something mundane to a suddenly
haunting image and the poems here are often worried by something troubling like
local or domestic miniatures that are metaphors for the larger, precarious
world.
Themes
of swimming, running or flight recur as if they are a search for release from such
anxiety. Sometimes it is resolved but not always and it is the search for
release that is the point rather than any guaranteed, comforting resolution.
Trick of the Eye leads us out of one chilling possibility only to disconcert with a
different doubt about what we think we are looking at; the language of Not Looking Where You Are Going breaks
down and fragments as the snail in it does. The
Night ‘groans as daylight/ rubbed it away’ and in Cutting Through, the wish is expressed to ‘muster all the sadness
in the world’ to cure it with a song of healing.
It
is healing that these poems would like to be able to offer but they are wise
enough to know that is too much to ask. It has still been worth the effort.