Ralph Hawkins: Gone to Marzipan
Published January 2009
Paperback, 120pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £9.95 / $17
ISBN 9781848610217
"Ralph Hawkins' poems . . . minimize the gap of 'constructive
effort' between
the basic seeking of pleasure and pleasurable sensations, and the 'mediated'
pleasure of the poem.
[…]
He does not bother with stage-setting. Each poem launches us into a series of
'direct experiences' from whose course we could work out the shape
of the self experiencing them. We could either take the individual events and
fit them into our own self-experience, or we could take each book as constructing
a new 'shell
self', a role we can both play for a while. Hawkins is not asking how experience
happens, but by describing the course of a self he answers the question anyway.
The course is one of attention, constantly switching on and off, jumping between
planes; Hawkins' method is to eliminate whatever is not interesting, and his
poetic line is as rapid, sporadic, shifting, polyvalent, slight and self-reversing
as consciousness itself. We could describe his work as anarchistic, because it
does not confirm any of the classificatory and causal judgments of our law-abiding
society, and experiences absolutely no urge to replace these with a new set of
rules and values.
[…]
The removal of conventional connections leaves a vast space for originality:
his style is located the edits, the jumps." (—Andrew Duncan)
from a review of the author's previouos collection:
"References in the poems are wide and dizzying, drawing on history, myth, popular culture. But they wear their learning lightly. They're absorbing, playful (though serious in intention), sometimes very funny, and never boring. These poems probably wouldn't win the national poetry competition. They're far too interesting." (Cliff Yates, The North)
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