It must have been daunting for a poet to be commissioned, as Dinah Hawken was by Chamber Music New Zealand, to write a sequence of poems to accompany 
performances of Haydn’s sublime The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross. She rose to the occasion superbly (I heard the Auckland performance) and the poems read well on the page, too, as part of her fine book The Leaf-Ride.
As I read this sequence – called here Peace on Earth – and, indeed, the entire book, John Keats’s words “the true voice of feeling” keep coming to mind:
All I can do
is bear it
all I can do
is remember that bearing
can carry the gifts
of wisdom and witness
that bearing can give its strength
to the first air-filled breath
of a child.
The many senses of “bear/bearing” – bear witness, bear gifts, bearing up, child-bearing and so on – underpin these lines.
Reference to birth introduces another theme in these poems, where truth of feeling protects against the pitfalls of easy sentiment – the birth of a first grandchild: “her breathing is brisk and she startles/– like a skink in a beach garden –/even when she sleeps” (Elsa). Such moments of familial intimacy share the stage with larger and more difficult themes, as in the poem Where are the girls, the title of which references a line (“Where/are the women, where exactly are we?”) in one of the most admired of Hawken’s early poems, Balance. She continues to strive for balance, in a world of “crisis” and “grief”, between images of a child burnt by a bomb in Beirut, another being tenderly taught to float on her back in a pool by her father, and another, 17, hiding from a brother ordered “to kill her/for falling in love with a boy”.
The effort to balance the worlds of private and public experience governs a strong sequence of 12 poems each of 12 lines, entitled Trying to conjure up someone like you by reading Rumi and Italo Calvino beside Lake Geneva after a visit to Turkey. Here the world of international diplomacy (“The Committee on Torture, the Committee on the Rights of the Child …”) jostles uneasily with thoughts arising from 13th-century Sufi mystic Rumi, such as “many demolitions/are actually renovations”.
Back on home territory in the 11-part Building Sonnets, Hawken takes refuge from global imponderables among dwangs, joists, trusses and tanalised poles, a reassuring world of “Know-how, protocol and plan”. Just like poetry.
THE LEAF-RIDE, by Dinah Hawken(VUP, $30).
Peter Simpson is an associate professor of English at the University of Auckland.