There’s a certain watchmaker’s quality to many of the poems in John Hawke’s collection Whirlwind Duststorm (published by the excellent Grand Parade Poets): assemblages of distinct parts meticulously pieced together into compact forms that give measure to grander, more abstract notions, while always being embedded in the quotidian.* Hawke’s descriptive precision and exactness of image are impressive, and they are often in tension with the open-ended nature of the poems themselves. This tension creates an enjoyably destabilizing effect for the reader, as when one stares too hard at an object and it begins to shimmer and blur, opening up the world from the particular to a more powerful and interesting ambiguity. The two poems that bookend the collection, “Axis” and “Dormition,” both achieve this effect.
John Hawke teaches literary studies at Monash University in Melbourne and is poetry editor of the Australian Book Review. His previous volume of poetry, Aurelia, was published by Cordite Press in 2015.
Axis
One sulphurous puff, then the white stick
is flicked spinning in a flare of sparks,
red globes throbbing down the harbour channel.
One vulnerable hand lifted, its sallow disclosure
pallid as the history of human error
pasted on placards, where arc-lights scatter
a brittle confetti: the florilegium of choice.
These itinerants marred by the stages of grieving
gather by handfuls at the terminus, swell into masses.
Some still bear marks of disfigurement
like mortal wounds, gashes insecurely bound,
heaped in the exhaustion of travel.
Most are older than usual, in loosely
drooping camisoles, or subsiding gowns.
A woman offers a baby she has never fed
to another for burial, passing in aura
through the mirror’s cathexis, the attendants
hunched in flag-bright uniforms,
paddling a ghost-train sleigh under the patchwork
awning of a coral tree, through scarlet petals
and tunnels of black opal. Then a steel door slams to.
Dormition
A mirror that refuses to light. Paired
black cockatoos patiently rowing
avenues of pleached hornbeams,
aurora hunters calculating degrees
of space grammar. The clutch and
groan of the grain elevator, laddered
as the scaffolding of Golgotha,
signals harvest: coils of feed grass
rolled silver under sheets of rain.
There was noise coming from your
house last night. The pipes rusting
closed deliver a treacle of ochre
and untraceable metals. That awful
Rachmaninoff under Richter’s piercing
thrumming of thrown daggers.
Lopped paspalum hovers yellow for days
on the steady pool of this late season.
I’m very comfortable. I’d prefer to sleep.
A fine rain hatches his skeletal shoes
crossing the light from the vestibule.
He doesn’t realise that he’s dead.
*A notable exception to this is the truly brilliant prose poem at the center of the collection, “The Wedding,” which, at eight pages, is too lengthy to post in full here but is alone worth seeking out the collection for. You can also read the terrific title poem, “Whirlwind Duststorm,” here.