I’ve not read much of Ralph Hawkins’ poetry before despite first coming across his work inAVarious Artsome years back but this is something I need to remedy. This little chapbook is wonderful. In his poem ‘Max Jacob – Some of the butchers had binoculars’we get the following line, a reference to both Max Jacob and Ted Berrigan – ‘Both poets being playful, humorous and serious and full of fraught connectives.’ It’s that ‘fraught connectives’ that does it, a phrase that could well be applied to Hawkins’ own poetry as beautifully exemplified in the following:
Corn from Delf is good for Elves
Bernadette Meyer
you can get a coach
transport yourself
Scarlett Johannson
an alien in Glasgow
the girl at the psalter
palmistry soap
all those overburdened
with the clothes they wore
the abandoned, the outcast, what future
they ‘fished’ them out of the sea
I’m…
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