It Looks Like an Island but Sails Away - Softcover

Hawkins, Ralph

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1848614209 ISBN 13: 9781848614208

Publisher: Shearsman Books, 2015

Synopsis

"Ralph Hawkins' poems... minimise 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. 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. [...] The removal of conventional connections leaves a vast space for originality: his style is located in the edits, the jumps." -Andrew Duncan

About this title

About the Author

Ralph Hawkins has been writing poetry since the late 1970s when he was one of a number of radical poets gathered at the University of Essex. He now lives on the Essex coast at Brightlingsea. Of many publications the more substantial are Tell Me No More and Tell Me (Grosseteste 1981), At Last Away (Galloping Dog Press 1988), The Coiling Dragon... (Equipage), and his three Shearsman collections."Do you think there's too much archaeology? Too many people need to dig things up and find them out. It's not necessary to some people and more than necessary for others. There's an industry around it ... It's the doing that's important, not the knowing about the doing. Because that's second. So, obviously some poets are more articulate than others, but articulacy can hide things ... There's a lot about, sounds impressive but misses the point, floundering around. Maybe that's not what you should be looking at. So I'm not really interested in an archaeology of understanding ..." - (Ralph Hawkins, from an interview with Ian Davidson)

Edition details

• Publisher: Shearsman Books
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1848614209
• ISBN 13: 9781848614208
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 122