One Shapely Thing: Poems and Journals
By Dinah HawkenVUP, NZ$29.95 | Reviewed by Joan Fleming
DINAH HAWKEN’s poetry slows you down. Her work is serious, especially her most recent collection One Shapely Thing. Each word of each poem carries a weight unlightened by the sublime flow of language. In this latest work, along with a collection of new poems, she has made an interesting choice to include two prose journals which explore the events around 9/11.
This mixture of prose and poetry is Dinah Hawken’s fifth book. Her first book, It Has No Sound and Is Blue, won the 1987 Commonwealth Poetry Prize for ‘Best First Time Published Poet.’ Three further books of poetry, and a writer’s residence in the Wellington botanical gardens, has solidified her presence as New Zealand’s celebrated nature poet.
Hawken’s new work marries her trademark attention to the environment with themes of political and social justice. There is a strong preoccupation with the possibilities of stone, leaf, and water, and a tiring attention to the birds of Lake Geneva who occupy the majority of the second journal section. The nature poems are at once languid and alert, inviting the reader to notice their place within the green chaos, and the responsibility this carries.
A poet’s representation of the world is always subjective. Hawken’s decision to include the prose journals makes the context of the book even more personal, as her record of world events is tied up with thoughts about friends and family, daily observations, and the therapeutic journaling that accompanies a writer’s personal crises. Like all histories, her narrative is seen through the lens of her own life. But rather than a self-aggrandisement, the journals reflect the individual’s small part and small influence in ‘the whole tremulous scheme of things,’ while taking comfort from an absorption in the natural world.
Parts of the journals, however, present as unformed and unedited prose. They read like the beginnings of ideas from which poems are formed – which of course they are. Other parts, like the end of the first journal The Softening of Steel, are astounding in their connections. The poet’s thoughts, activities, chance readings and dreams come together to form a coherent statement. This is the stuff of well-crafted novels. In these seemingly serendipitous connections, the value of including the journals lies.
Many of the poems’ structures naturally enforce their meaning. Thinking about Forgiveness begins with the intriguing lines: ‘the v in give/is a valley/you can walk down.’ It’s an image that mirrors the mindspace of the poet; the getting-down and getting-into space of thinking about some very real and human actions. The language is not complex or impenetrable – though the thoughts behind the poems may be. The 13 pages of The Brain and the Leaf are as divaricating as the muehlenbeckia shrub that’s compared (eventually) to the human brain. This native shrub is also the subject of the gorgeously branching poem Muelenbeckia Astonii.
Although serious, the poems are hopeful and invite contemplation of a rare kind. This is not a book to be read piecemeal, in spurts and stops. This One Shapely Thing should be approached with the same patience with which it was written. Read chronologically, the poems and journals reinforce each other. The pieces that deal with our relationship and obligation to the natural world also explore our obligation to each other, as humans. An awareness of the environment, both natural and political, is at the heart of this book’s strength and imagination.
