BLURBS AND REVIEWS
Praise for West of the Backstory
(Fernwood Press, Newberg, OR; October 2021; 182 pages)
Arnold Johnston, author of Where We're Going, Where We've Been and Swept Away
This extremely generous and lucid collection by a consummate poet celebrates "quotidian milestones" and our own evanescence. Elegiac in tone, but leavened by welcome humor, Tim Hawkins' West of the Backstory admirably focuses on "creating light for its lonely/old sake."
Kurt Luchs, author of the poetry collection Falling in the Direction of Up and the humor collection It's Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It's REALLY Funny), both from Sagging Meniscus Press
Tim Hawkins has traveled far and returned to tell us what he saw. His outward journeys find a parallel in his equally exotic inward wanderings, in visionary reveries of the people and places he has loved. In a way these are almost all love poems by a man with a burning passion for existence, fraught though it may be. The intoxicating intersection of inner and outer is where many of them live, mingling the careful observations of the senses with the modifications of memory so that we experience each scene, each character (including his own, about which he is unsparing), from multiple angles and in the completeness of time. Whether he's writing free or formal verse, this approach makes it almost holographic and often quite memorable, as in this brief example, a poem called "What Have I Done?" "No real food or sleep for days- / only doll's head tea in a rusty bucket / brewed with scalding tears."
-Kurt Luchs, author of the poetry collection Falling in the Direction of Up and the humor collection It's Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It's REALLY Funny), both from Sagging Meniscus Press
(Fernwood Press, Newberg, OR; October 2021; 182 pages)
Arnold Johnston, author of Where We're Going, Where We've Been and Swept Away
This extremely generous and lucid collection by a consummate poet celebrates "quotidian milestones" and our own evanescence. Elegiac in tone, but leavened by welcome humor, Tim Hawkins' West of the Backstory admirably focuses on "creating light for its lonely/old sake."
Kurt Luchs, author of the poetry collection Falling in the Direction of Up and the humor collection It's Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It's REALLY Funny), both from Sagging Meniscus Press
Tim Hawkins has traveled far and returned to tell us what he saw. His outward journeys find a parallel in his equally exotic inward wanderings, in visionary reveries of the people and places he has loved. In a way these are almost all love poems by a man with a burning passion for existence, fraught though it may be. The intoxicating intersection of inner and outer is where many of them live, mingling the careful observations of the senses with the modifications of memory so that we experience each scene, each character (including his own, about which he is unsparing), from multiple angles and in the completeness of time. Whether he's writing free or formal verse, this approach makes it almost holographic and often quite memorable, as in this brief example, a poem called "What Have I Done?" "No real food or sleep for days- / only doll's head tea in a rusty bucket / brewed with scalding tears."
-Kurt Luchs, author of the poetry collection Falling in the Direction of Up and the humor collection It's Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It's REALLY Funny), both from Sagging Meniscus Press
Praise for Synchronized Swimmers
(KYSO Flash Press, Bellingham, WA; October 2019; 66 pages)
Amorak Huey, author of Boom Box and Seducing the Asparagus Queen
Synchronized Swimmers is a wistful marvel of a collection. “Whatever I propose … will never do it justice,” one poem’s speaker laments, and indeed the world’s mysteries and heartbreaks are too vast and complex for language. Yet the poems and stories in this book reach achingly into that abyss and fill a reader with hope. These are explorations of grief and loneliness, tender and searching, urging us to value our connections to each other and to the planet we inhabit: “Whisper some small true words / bearing the scars of your teeth / and we shall savor the harvest with our tongues.” It’s not enough; it’s what we can do.
Jennifer Finstrom, Poetry Editor, Eclectica Magazine (2005–2018)
“The Painter’s Garden” is the first piece in Tim Hawkins’ latest book, and to me, that title is significant. When I imagine a painter’s garden, I picture a place filled with beauty and memory, filled with the stuff of inspiration that leads to a greater and more nuanced view. The reader finds in Synchronized Swimmers a world that circles back upon itself, and though the paintings in that first work are “consumed by fire and forest,” they still exist because we view them.
In this same way, memories that arise here continue to exist no matter how much time has passed. The memory of a father appears to be lost in the “frost-covered and locked” morgue entrance but is available in the “iridescent metal of starlings wheeling and calling in bright shafts of morning light.” A sense of time seems freed from its moorings in these poems, and not only memories are free to move about, but other imaginings as well, all of these things accessible to us on the page, just as “all the dogs of his life will come running in from the countryside trailing their leashes, at long-last free to roam in feral, headlong packs.”
Diana May-Waldman, award-winning journalist, author, activist and poetry editor of Blue Lake Review
Hawkins, pen-to-paper, produces an intimate narrative that holds a mirror to the literal meaning of his words—precisely the mixture of Picasso and Gertrude Stein that he mentions in the short fiction piece, "Things Have Dropped from Me." He is an artist and a poet, and his collection, Synchronized Swimmers, is deeply-rooted and well-crafted. It is the depth of his writing that tangles me into the sturdy fabric of his style.
(KYSO Flash Press, Bellingham, WA; October 2019; 66 pages)
Amorak Huey, author of Boom Box and Seducing the Asparagus Queen
Synchronized Swimmers is a wistful marvel of a collection. “Whatever I propose … will never do it justice,” one poem’s speaker laments, and indeed the world’s mysteries and heartbreaks are too vast and complex for language. Yet the poems and stories in this book reach achingly into that abyss and fill a reader with hope. These are explorations of grief and loneliness, tender and searching, urging us to value our connections to each other and to the planet we inhabit: “Whisper some small true words / bearing the scars of your teeth / and we shall savor the harvest with our tongues.” It’s not enough; it’s what we can do.
Jennifer Finstrom, Poetry Editor, Eclectica Magazine (2005–2018)
“The Painter’s Garden” is the first piece in Tim Hawkins’ latest book, and to me, that title is significant. When I imagine a painter’s garden, I picture a place filled with beauty and memory, filled with the stuff of inspiration that leads to a greater and more nuanced view. The reader finds in Synchronized Swimmers a world that circles back upon itself, and though the paintings in that first work are “consumed by fire and forest,” they still exist because we view them.
In this same way, memories that arise here continue to exist no matter how much time has passed. The memory of a father appears to be lost in the “frost-covered and locked” morgue entrance but is available in the “iridescent metal of starlings wheeling and calling in bright shafts of morning light.” A sense of time seems freed from its moorings in these poems, and not only memories are free to move about, but other imaginings as well, all of these things accessible to us on the page, just as “all the dogs of his life will come running in from the countryside trailing their leashes, at long-last free to roam in feral, headlong packs.”
Diana May-Waldman, award-winning journalist, author, activist and poetry editor of Blue Lake Review
Hawkins, pen-to-paper, produces an intimate narrative that holds a mirror to the literal meaning of his words—precisely the mixture of Picasso and Gertrude Stein that he mentions in the short fiction piece, "Things Have Dropped from Me." He is an artist and a poet, and his collection, Synchronized Swimmers, is deeply-rooted and well-crafted. It is the depth of his writing that tangles me into the sturdy fabric of his style.
Praise for Jeremiad Johnson
(In Case of Emergency Press, Adelaide, Australia; July 2019; 46 pages)
Howard Firkin, Editorial Director, In Case of Emergency Press, author of the novel, Male Pattern Behaviour and the play, Fit for Nothing
Jeremiad Johnson is the work of poet, Tim Hawkins, who is well known to both Australian and US readers. In this remarkable work, Hawkins creates an extraordinary figure of our times - Jeremiad Johnson - an evolutionary offspring of the semi-legendary John 'Liver-Eating' Johnson of the North American West. As Hawkins says, "These poems are Johnson’s bilious jeremiad, his prolonged lamentation, complaint, screed, rant, cautionary tale and harangue—by turns irascible, peevish, chastened and accepting."
Barry Harris, Editor, Tipton Poetry Journal
I first discovered Tim Hawkins’ poetry when Tipton Poetry Journal published “Gaius Cassius Longinus Breaks the Fourth Wall,” a clever political lament concerning he who would be Caesar. In Jeremiad Johnson, Hawkins speaks in the poetic voice of a common man surviving somehow in this world we all share together. This is deft observational poetry that escorts readers into the familiar and recognizable scenes that Hawkins paints for us with vivid imagery, touches of irony and subtle humility. There is a recurrent tug in this book between the natural world and humanity’s current state. In “Animal Planet,” Hawkins reminds us how “wild creatures assert their presence / in the here and now” but that “we, of course, are the real aliens; / each a world unto one’s own, / orbiting a sun of its own devising.”
Elizabeth Kerlikowske, author of The Shape of Dad, Last Hula, and Chain of Lakes; president of Kalamazoo Friends of Poetry and The Poetry Society of Michigan
Tim Hawkins’ Jeremiad Johnson balances on the razor wire between natural beauty and disgust with the world as it has devolved to us. The hallowed and the tainted counterpose, and depending on the reader’s mood, what Hawkins reveals in his poems is a fortifying or merciless vision. Sometimes both.
(In Case of Emergency Press, Adelaide, Australia; July 2019; 46 pages)
Howard Firkin, Editorial Director, In Case of Emergency Press, author of the novel, Male Pattern Behaviour and the play, Fit for Nothing
Jeremiad Johnson is the work of poet, Tim Hawkins, who is well known to both Australian and US readers. In this remarkable work, Hawkins creates an extraordinary figure of our times - Jeremiad Johnson - an evolutionary offspring of the semi-legendary John 'Liver-Eating' Johnson of the North American West. As Hawkins says, "These poems are Johnson’s bilious jeremiad, his prolonged lamentation, complaint, screed, rant, cautionary tale and harangue—by turns irascible, peevish, chastened and accepting."
Barry Harris, Editor, Tipton Poetry Journal
I first discovered Tim Hawkins’ poetry when Tipton Poetry Journal published “Gaius Cassius Longinus Breaks the Fourth Wall,” a clever political lament concerning he who would be Caesar. In Jeremiad Johnson, Hawkins speaks in the poetic voice of a common man surviving somehow in this world we all share together. This is deft observational poetry that escorts readers into the familiar and recognizable scenes that Hawkins paints for us with vivid imagery, touches of irony and subtle humility. There is a recurrent tug in this book between the natural world and humanity’s current state. In “Animal Planet,” Hawkins reminds us how “wild creatures assert their presence / in the here and now” but that “we, of course, are the real aliens; / each a world unto one’s own, / orbiting a sun of its own devising.”
Elizabeth Kerlikowske, author of The Shape of Dad, Last Hula, and Chain of Lakes; president of Kalamazoo Friends of Poetry and The Poetry Society of Michigan
Tim Hawkins’ Jeremiad Johnson balances on the razor wire between natural beauty and disgust with the world as it has devolved to us. The hallowed and the tainted counterpose, and depending on the reader’s mood, what Hawkins reveals in his poems is a fortifying or merciless vision. Sometimes both.
Praise for Wanderings at Deadline
(Aldrich Press, Torrance, CA; October 2012; 74 pages)
Karen Kelsay, Editor and Publisher of Aldrich Press
“The poems of Tim Hawkins range widely in geography, tone and style in search of the extraordinary in the things we take for granted, guided always by the mission of the saint and the lunatic to be both in the moment and apart from it at the same time. While expressing admiration for time-honored values like hard work, skill and fidelity to ideals and individuals, they also exhibit a deep appreciation for the irony and absurdity of existence, yet an unwillingness to submit to dogma or a cheap affectation of nihilism. In Wanderings at Deadline, Hawkins takes us on a tour of a landscape recognizable as part natural world and part memory and imagination, where we explore human thought, feeling and action at times resigned to hard truths and at times playful, capricious and inexplicable.”
John Amen, Co-author of The New Arcana; Editor of The Pedestal Magazine
“Tim Hawkins revels in narrative, compelling imagery, and a wide range of emotional tones. He plumbs the polar dynamics of solitude and interconnectedness, how the human mind and heart are constantly delighted and besieged by the interplay of Eros and Thanatos. These are poems worth savoring.”
Zinta Aistars, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Smoking Poet
"To read the poetry of Tim Hawkins is to move slowly, serenely into some distant and exotic place—yet find oneself in the comfort of home. Deer lie down in the tall grasses. A heron sweeps across the blue. A storm approaches on the distant horizon with a rumble that sounds like laughter. Even when Hawkins writes of discontent, he weaves lines that embrace, and hold, and let go slowly, slowly, leaving an imprint on the heart. His style has the rhythm, sometimes even the rhyme, of the traditional, but his poetry is all Hawkins. A new tradition here begins."
Ann Drysdale, acclaimed journalist, non-fiction writer and author of five poetry collections, most recently Quaintness and Other Offenses (Cinnamon Press, 2009)
“This collection does honour to the reality of life; to the blood and bones of it. Its internal logic moves gently through a life’s landscape and the longer poems give breathing-space to the thinking that develops within them. Within and between the poems, there is a gentle insistence on the necessity of travel. ‘A Youthful Idyll,’ for instance, treks backwards through a surreal narrative to end where it began, leaving us to ponder ruefully the undeniable power of unrequited loves. Such mortal shocks have always been great senders-forth of sad adventurers. Here, with unforced inevitability, ‘A Blood-Red Prayer’ leads us unerringly to ‘A Perfect Spiral.’ This poetry moves; go with it.”
(The Late) Paul Stevens, Editor of The Flea, The Chimaera, and Shit Creek Review
“Tim Hawkins' poetry is characterized by deftness of phrasing, skillful craft, freshness and impact of imagery, boldness and penetration of thought, and by engagement with an impressive range of subject, form and mood. This exciting new voice in contemporary verse will richly reward poetry lovers and satisfy connoisseurs."
"Because of its very high quality, rigorous thought and fresh originality, I have been most pleased to publish Tim Hawkins’ poetry alongside such distinguished writers as Les Murray, Timothy Murphy, Robert Mezey, Rhina P. Espaillat, Ann Drysdale and Janet Kenny. The true and authentic poetic voice emerging from these exquisitely-crafted poems is one that will command great attention in the years to come.”
Carolyn Zukowski, Editor of The Literary Bohemian
“Tim Hawkins’ Wanderings at Deadline is an alchemical brew of childhood wonder and adult introspection sparked with wild and woolly humour. The reader will find a home in each of these wanderings – from nudist colony to football field, from Koh Phangan to roadside diner. Hawkins has re-discovered the territories of being:
‘...pleased and shy as deer in fields of spring…
not as tail-less, lumbering animals, growling and sniffing
for the bones we had buried and lost.’”
(from “On Revisiting an Ancient Headland”)
(Aldrich Press, Torrance, CA; October 2012; 74 pages)
Karen Kelsay, Editor and Publisher of Aldrich Press
“The poems of Tim Hawkins range widely in geography, tone and style in search of the extraordinary in the things we take for granted, guided always by the mission of the saint and the lunatic to be both in the moment and apart from it at the same time. While expressing admiration for time-honored values like hard work, skill and fidelity to ideals and individuals, they also exhibit a deep appreciation for the irony and absurdity of existence, yet an unwillingness to submit to dogma or a cheap affectation of nihilism. In Wanderings at Deadline, Hawkins takes us on a tour of a landscape recognizable as part natural world and part memory and imagination, where we explore human thought, feeling and action at times resigned to hard truths and at times playful, capricious and inexplicable.”
John Amen, Co-author of The New Arcana; Editor of The Pedestal Magazine
“Tim Hawkins revels in narrative, compelling imagery, and a wide range of emotional tones. He plumbs the polar dynamics of solitude and interconnectedness, how the human mind and heart are constantly delighted and besieged by the interplay of Eros and Thanatos. These are poems worth savoring.”
Zinta Aistars, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Smoking Poet
"To read the poetry of Tim Hawkins is to move slowly, serenely into some distant and exotic place—yet find oneself in the comfort of home. Deer lie down in the tall grasses. A heron sweeps across the blue. A storm approaches on the distant horizon with a rumble that sounds like laughter. Even when Hawkins writes of discontent, he weaves lines that embrace, and hold, and let go slowly, slowly, leaving an imprint on the heart. His style has the rhythm, sometimes even the rhyme, of the traditional, but his poetry is all Hawkins. A new tradition here begins."
Ann Drysdale, acclaimed journalist, non-fiction writer and author of five poetry collections, most recently Quaintness and Other Offenses (Cinnamon Press, 2009)
“This collection does honour to the reality of life; to the blood and bones of it. Its internal logic moves gently through a life’s landscape and the longer poems give breathing-space to the thinking that develops within them. Within and between the poems, there is a gentle insistence on the necessity of travel. ‘A Youthful Idyll,’ for instance, treks backwards through a surreal narrative to end where it began, leaving us to ponder ruefully the undeniable power of unrequited loves. Such mortal shocks have always been great senders-forth of sad adventurers. Here, with unforced inevitability, ‘A Blood-Red Prayer’ leads us unerringly to ‘A Perfect Spiral.’ This poetry moves; go with it.”
(The Late) Paul Stevens, Editor of The Flea, The Chimaera, and Shit Creek Review
“Tim Hawkins' poetry is characterized by deftness of phrasing, skillful craft, freshness and impact of imagery, boldness and penetration of thought, and by engagement with an impressive range of subject, form and mood. This exciting new voice in contemporary verse will richly reward poetry lovers and satisfy connoisseurs."
"Because of its very high quality, rigorous thought and fresh originality, I have been most pleased to publish Tim Hawkins’ poetry alongside such distinguished writers as Les Murray, Timothy Murphy, Robert Mezey, Rhina P. Espaillat, Ann Drysdale and Janet Kenny. The true and authentic poetic voice emerging from these exquisitely-crafted poems is one that will command great attention in the years to come.”
Carolyn Zukowski, Editor of The Literary Bohemian
“Tim Hawkins’ Wanderings at Deadline is an alchemical brew of childhood wonder and adult introspection sparked with wild and woolly humour. The reader will find a home in each of these wanderings – from nudist colony to football field, from Koh Phangan to roadside diner. Hawkins has re-discovered the territories of being:
‘...pleased and shy as deer in fields of spring…
not as tail-less, lumbering animals, growling and sniffing
for the bones we had buried and lost.’”
(from “On Revisiting an Ancient Headland”)
Reviews
Wanderings at Deadline. Tim Hawkins. Aldrich Press: Torrance, CA, 2012.
Reviewed by Anthony O. Tyler
(Reprinted permission of Blueline - A literary magazine dedicated to the spirit of the Adirondacks, Volume XXXIV, June 2013).
For me the best poems of Tim Hawkins in his first collection, Wanderings at Deadline, are those that employ an objective correlative. “Ballad of the Logos,” for example, references Heraclitus and his philosophy of change:
He stood transfixed, made careful note
of every feature of this sacred spot
and vowed to bathe here again the coming spring.
But he never found his way again. (12)
I’m undecided about the last line of the poem, however:
his heart had chosen its own varied course
and broke on the shore of a vast blue sea
called Permanence. (12)
On the one hand that last line reminds us of Heraclitus’s philosophy if we do not remember it. On the other hand, it
undercuts the evocative nature of the end of the poem.
Another poem, “The Fibonacci Sequence,” brilliantly renders an abstract mathematical concept in a concrete illustration, cutting grass. In the Fibonacci Sequence adding two numbers creates the sum of the two e.g. 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13, etc. The sequence can be rendered in geometrical form using rectangles cut into a grass lawn. The number of lines in the six stanzas of the poem also embodies the sequence: 1,1,2,3,5,8. What a delightful tour de force.
Many of Hawkins’ poems allude to his experiences traveling and living in the East and other places. “Out into the Fields” powerfully depicts the situation of a primitive farmer: “He is rooted like no other kind of man / to a defining time
and place” (42). At the end of winter this farmer has doubts about being able to grow enough to sustain his family, but the evocation of spring by the poet tells us he will persevere: “he steps with the sun full in his face / out into the
soft and yielding fields / with the first day of planting close at hand. The spring land rendered as feminine echoes that he is able to succeed with the help of his wife.
“Being Youthful and Lacking Tact,” set in Burma, recalls an experience of the poet as a young man. We see the idealistic poet asking profound questions juxtaposed to a monk who is living in the moment: “Crunching the core of an apple between his teeth / with relish” (31). The monk has no answers and only sits there enjoying the eating of his fruit. Years later, the wiser poet shares with us his youthful naiveté.
Hawkins' sense of humor emerges in a number of his poems. One of the most delightful is called “A Fishing Story.” It tells of being interrupted at a campground while preparing to go fishing by a girl needing help rinsing her hair at the water pump. Without thinking much about it, he helps her and then goes fishing, only later realizing he didn’t ask her name. He cleverly uses a cliché for a humorous analogy: “I swore I wouldn’t call this the one that got away” (23). Years later as he writes the poem “barbs of regret still lodged like a hook / or a fishbone in my throat.”
The last of the five sections in this collection is fittingly titled “Departures.” It’s difficult to contemplate the passing of one’s life and avoid being maudlin. Hawkins skillfully avoids weak sentiment in the poem “Nautical.” The poet stands on a pier looking out to sea and wonders
Why does the earth sway under my feet
when there are so many things left to be done?
Why now this vision, so crisp and so clear,
as finally just one more untimely departure? (70)
These are unanswerable questions yet bring resolution.
These hors d’oeuvres serve as a taste of the richness and variety to be found in this collection.
"Being Youthful and Lacking Tact"
Editors' Pick by Ann Drysdale
(Reprinted permission of The Shit Creek Review: Issue 14 - God(s), July 2011)
Editors’ Picks
Ann Drysdale: “Being Youthful and Lacking Tact” by Tim Hawkins.
First, the title snared me. Then I felt my face slipping into a grin as I read the poem and it still pleases me after steady stream of re-reads. I shall keep it in my head. It is the gentlest of send-ups of all the earnest pretentiousness of my generation. Look! All the clichés are here; the tatami mat and the tea room and the inscrutable archetypal master who perhaps knew what we all found out later. Reading this, I feel the breeze lifting the curtain. I hear the bamboo but I listen to the bones. Reading this, I forgive myself and reach for a strawberry.