Bracken Women in Lime Trees

Pauline Hawkesworth

Having first read the eponymous Bracken Women, in Reach Poetry, it was a pleasant surprise to be asked to review Pauline Hawkesworth’s new anthology. Published by Indigo Dreams Press, in the customary attractive format with its evocative colour cover illustration, the collection does not disappoint. I was immediately enthralled by the feeling of mystery in Bracken Women, its elusive quality of surrealism, resulting from contrasting images:

sky coming through her knotted coat;
a root-stock of tangled kisses.

There is a thread of something half-seen, something slightly sinister, which runs through her work:

look above you, she is ready to unleash her chains
(Bracken Women again).

And
I am watching the pansies
from behind the safety
of the kitchen window
(Warning).

The poetic images often juxtapose the common-place with the greater world of emotions or nature, as in Little Bear, where ironing shirts is combined with astronomical events:

I find Polaris sitting on the edge
of a factory roof,
we have arranged ourselves
to find it, at this late hour.

And in Stains

the full moon rolls her white face
as if bending to clean her shoes.

These poems show us that which we have all experienced, but have not had the words to describe, thus

The stem of the rainbow
has crashed onto the motorway,
petrol patterning tarmac.
Pieces of sky lie prostrate.
(Crash)

And the sounds of the night in Falling:

And you wish
it was the falling
of a box of fruit
onto the tiles
of the kitchen floor.

All the more disturbing for never knowing what the sound was in reality.
I have enjoyed these poems at first reading, and have no doubt that I will appreciate them more each time. This is a worthy winner of the IDP Booklet Competition.
Tina Negus - Envoi

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Bracken Women In Lime Trees: Collection by Pauline Hawkesworth

I want to lick my way
over salt-wave butchered cliffs;
observe time and again
guillemots dashing into
ocean spray for fish (Armchair Traveller)

Now here’s a newly-published poetry collection with rather an intriguing title, but then, Pauline Hawkesworth, the author of this scintillating selection of verse in appealing Free Verse mode, is ever the fanciful dreamer whose finely honed elements of imagery are omnipresent in her writings – and most certainly within this absorbing publication. Readers will recall that Pauline’s recent composite submission was one of the declared winners in the Reach Poetry 2008 Booklet Competition, and as one browses through these pages it is easy to see why.

Pauline has written poetry since leaving school, at the age of fifteen. A ubiquitous small press writer, she has not only authored two previous collections, but has been actively involved working with fellow writers in workshops and regular meetings at Portsmouth Poetry Society, where she has been chairperson for a number of years. However, despite her many pressing social activities, church commitments and secretarial calls upon her busy working life, it would seem that Pauline is never happier than when strolling with her dog through the leafy outer-suburban area of Portsmouth where she resides; and this, coupled with some of the nearby rock-strewn coastal scenery that is readily available for her to enjoy:

A lottery of shapes, secured by kelps,
wanted us to peel back the coverings,
find out who they are that plough
oceans to arrive here, on those pebbles
at this precise moment in time. (Journeying People)

And it is those welcome moments of blissful meanderings with her dog, that have enriched much of Pauline’s imagery with incidentals of land-forms and tree description; the title of the collection, itself, reflecting her penchant for formulating fanciful shapes within the intertwining foliage of those great lime trees that she particularly loves. Pauline equally draws upon her day-to-day observations of people and places during the course of her writings, and here there is scope for her social concern, to some extent. In her disturbing portrayal of a down-trodden, unkempt, wheel-chaired older lady seen shopping in a Sainsbury’s store, she mentally castigates the woman’s overbearing male relative for his obvious neglectful lack of consideration for the lady’s well-being:

All I notice was her unkempt hair
the grease giving deep furrows.
He was pushing her around
Sainsbury’s aisle by aisle. (Shopping)

In similar vein, her poem The Coach, presents, in verse, the inevitable impasse of a situation in which the aggressive verbal tactics of a club coach, pitched against the will of an injured girl athlete are all to no avail in persuading participation in a long-distance event:

She will not perform
this cross-country race –
beautiful though the scenery
is – for him ever;
something evil descended
into him, making all he said
shatter into tiny threads of glass. (The Coach)

Nostalgia becomes the order of the day in Pauline’s People Who Move Away, a poem telling of the writer’s repeated endeavours to maintain contact with friends who had moved a fair distance from their former settled environment. In several other poems the moon, the stars and the very vastness of the skies occupy her musings to a large degree – evidence, yet again, of her nocturnal dog-walking forays.

A neatly assembled selection of poems by a well-versed prize-winning writer whose extensive interests and activities find constant reflection in the faithful measure of her verse.
Bernard M Jackson - Reach Poetry

Bracken Women in Lime Trees

Pauline Hawkesworth

ISBN 978-0-9553589-1-3

68 pages

£7.50

NIGHT AIR

It is 11pm. A hunched man
flickers from shadows,
crosses the road-bridge;
a slice of grey, hint of the unknown.

Now he hurries through the night
taking the storm with him,
sweeping a flow of rain
ahead of his walking.

My dog barks at the night.
The man stops going away from me,
turns, approaches.
The rain is silent, the water recedes.
Then he is near to me
and the dog is going crazy.

I start to smile,
his face comes into focus.
He will pass through me,
he is my father, walking in the night air
as he did when I was young, out late
and he met me from that last bus home.

FALLING

You may have thought
it was the sound
of someone dropping
a box of fruit
onto the kitchen tiles,
or perhaps
the door of the lounge
swinging shut.

You may have thought
many things.
Perhaps it was inside your brain
where the loud ‘thud’
of doors keeps you awake
at night, when all you want
is sleep and silence.

But that one door
keeps shutting,
keeps your eyes from closing,
and you wish
it was the falling
of a box of fruit
onto the tiles
of the kitchen floor.