The title of Dinah Hawken’s new book leads us simultaneously into a deep
aquatic zone and a cultivated pebble garden. Once inside, a striking but almost
nondescript motif recurs – call it a form of punctuation or a basic decorative
device – the black dot which appears, centre-page, five times as you make your
way through Ocean and Stone.
An emblem for the book, this recurrent dot is anything but a full-stop.
In fact, it is the exact opposite. It suggests we are at the beginning or in
the middle of something. It could be a molecule or a dark planet adrift on the
Milky Way of the page; maybe it is a mid-Pacific island and the page is the
sea. A presence in the midst of absence. We’ve been here before in Dinah’s
poetry. Ocean and stone. The stone in the ocean. The dot is also a speck on the
horizon, a vanishing or unvanishing point. Things reduce down to this one black
spot, reminding us how poetry is, in essence, a concentration of thought and
matter.
Dinah’s poetry traces a movement towards the centre, the heart, the
soul. ‘Keep your eye and mind on the lake,’ she writes, demanding a very
particular kind of attentiveness of her readers. So the black dot is the centre
of an eyeball, looking very closely. It is both open lens and focal point.
There are certain qualities, virtues, in Dinah’s poetry which have been
highlighted many times before. Her writing is reflective, responsive, elemental,
searching, moral, illuminating, incantatory, sensuous, spiritual, numinous,
environmental, environmentalist, edifying, supple, delicate, attentive,
radiant… For Dinah, poetry has always been a process of getting things in
proportion, in perspective. The poem, like life itself, is a balancing act. I’m
reminded again of Claude Levi Strauss’s assertion that art is located halfway
between scientific knowledge and mythical or magical thought.
Beyond the unitary form of the dot, the point in time and space, life
and poetry tend to be made up of interactions, relationships, juxtapositions
and conjunctions. And therein lies one of the most gracious gestures of Dinah’s
poetry: her bringing together of ocean and stone, yin and yang, movement and
stillness, fluidity and form, agitation and calming. The poetry is at once an
awakening and, that rare thing in the modern world, a lullaby.
In the central part of the new book, ‘page . stone . leaf’, two black
dots punctuate the three nouns of the section title.The dots link the nouns
together, each a fulcrum, bringing the
disparate objects – page, stone, leaf – into a state of mutual, respectful
dependence, an equilibrium.
Dinah’s poems are the subtlest of breathing exercises, their sounds and
meanings are drawn in, then exhaled. They could well be a form of poetic Tai
chi. However, her poetry is no cloister. Alongside revisited mythologies and
oceanic reveries, her new poems are inhabited by a vocal and uncompromising
brood of children. We are reminded that grandchildren are as much a part of
Nature as is the silhouette of Kapiti Island. Life is not only a leaf-ride,
it’s also the train or car trip in from Paekakariki, the trajectory of a
plastic bike across a kitchen floor, or quality time spent with a playdough snake.
In Ocean and Stone, the happenstance
and ordinariness of daily life become a crystalline structure.
As Derek Walcott once observed of the watercolours of Winslow Homer,
Dinah has created an ‘elegaic Eden, not a paradise of escape but one of
healing’. She visits a friend
hospitalised with dementia and, along the way, enlarges the catchment of her
poetic meditation on being, well being and the end of being.
Dinah Hawken’s manner of writing and thinking has become an essential
and influential ingredient in recent New Zealand poetry. The work of many
younger poets acknowledges Dinah’s legacy of things planted and nurtured, the
clearing she has made in the superficial undergrowth of this materialistic era.
And I’d like to think her writing has contributed to a broader pattern of
thinking and feeling in this country.
Returning to the dot upon which so much depends – this mark on a map
which denotes where we are as well as where Dinah is. The centre point of the
mandala. Maybe this dot is also the singular entity, the individual self,
surrounded by a world yet to find form or meaning. Thinking further into
Dinah’s revisionist grammar, we might conclude that, in her poetry, the First
Person Singular is no longer an ‘I’ – it has become a dot, a point in space, a
particle or seed, the beginning of life itself.
It is only a week since James K. Baxter’s Collected Prose was launched on a hilltop near here – a five
kilogram Holy Tablet hoisted down from the Holy Mountain. I’ll conclude by
acknowledging a purposefulness I find in the writing of both Dinah Hawken and
James K. Baxter. These two new books demand more than a simple reading. They
ask that we consider our actions, and the direction in which we are heading,
collectively and as individuals. In their different ways, they are principled,
instructive and challenging publications. Beyond that, of course, comparing the
books of Dinah Hawken and James K. Baxter is like comparing a kite with an
internal combustion engine.
Congratulations to Dinah and to all concerned for this fine, exquisite
production, in which the subtle calibrations of John Edgar’s drawings are
integral and edifying.
With no added preservatives, artificial ingredients or genetically
modified materials, Ocean and Stone
is as real as it is vivid. No animals were harmed during the making of this
exemplary production. Dinah Hawken’s poems are not a dairy herd and Victoria
University Press, thank goodness, is not Fonterra. This is a supple, organic,
holistic, balanced and sustainable production, a creation of self-renewing
wonder.
Gregory O’Brien
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