It Looks Like an Island But Sails Away

"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