Review: Faces and Flowers, by Dinah Hawken

In this beautifully presented collection, Dinah Hawken devotes her attention to the vivid paintings of Patricia France.

Her unrhymed sonnets are painterly, contemplative –

‘Colour, I see now, has been my silent, / vital, lifelong partner. I’ve loved it /’ (Colour)

and at the same time, they are bold, urgent, pulling contemporary issues into their scope.

‘Eucalyptus burns like hell. The flames are metres / higher than the trees    themselves.’ (The unimaginable summer)

Hawken’s skill at depicting the natural world shines through – as a world both under threat and powerfully restorative.

‘…and today – here – every bit of it is brilliant.’  (We cannot think of a time that is oceanless …)

These are poems with grit. Nature is never ‘flowery’ here, rather it mirrors the fierce depictions of nature in the paintings.

‘I search your paintings of flowers/ and see nothing fragile in their colours.’ (Consider the future and the past with an equal mind)

People too, in this world, are resilient and complex. France spent time at Ashburn Hall as an inpatient and her mental health convalescence became an encounter with memory, self-possession and creativity –

‘‘…the lovely, inside, living drive’/’ (Alone and not alone)

She entered as a patient and left as a painter.

Full of colour plates of her vibrant, eclectic paintings, the collection interrogates environmental changes, mental health, the effects of circumstances and actions through the generations, ageing, creativity, all with the poet’s tender hand – things that given just a little devotion, may open in all their complexity, like a face or a flower. 

‘…but your flowers/ are not waiting, they have opened out/ into the full knowledge of living and dying.’  (Consider the future and the past with an equal mind)

The Children

Are they the children you never had? Are they the cousins of your childhood? My aunts? Are they the child killed in the car accident years ago and still haunting?

Are they the child embedded inside you wondering and suffering? Don’t give me 

an answer. Did your father leave you or did he die? Did he strike your mother?

These are things not to be told but are ‘smeared, blotched, layered

and washed’ darkly in the paint of composed faces and fierce flowers.

I see you at your easel, near the bay window, both painting in, and painting out, the past.