New Zealand Writers

HAWKEN, Dinah

Combines powerful inwardness with international awareness.

Author entry from The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, edited by Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie (1998). [About the Companion entries]

HAWKEN, Dinah (1943- ), is a poet who combines powerful inwardness with international awareness. She was born in Hawera, trained as a physiotherapist, psychotherapist and social worker in New Zealand and the United States and is currently a student counsellor at Victoria University.

Most of the poems in her first collection, It Has No Sound and Is Blue (1987), were written during a three-year period in New York in the mid-1980s while she was studying for a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Brooklyn College and working with the homeless and mentally ill. The volume's centrepiece, 'Writing Home', is a sequence of sixteen unrhymed sonnets, formally modelled on James K. Baxter's Jerusalem Sonnets, but focusing on women's issues, specifically the need to achieve a state of inner balance in a world under threat.

Other notable literary influences include Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich. The collection won the Best First Time Published Poet section of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for 1987 and at once established Hawken locally as one of the most distinctive new voices of her generation. Small Stories of Devotion (1991, UK edn 1995), described by Hawken as 'the diary of a woman it takes time to love', was equally well received.

Closer to prose poetry, this second collection fuses dream, myth and the everyday into a series of meditations about female spirituality. Water, Leaves, Stones (1995), with its wary celebration of the natural world, further develops Hawken's central concerns.

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Updated Information

Dinah Hawken published a small collection of poetry, The Little Book of Bitching, which appeared with issue 21 of the literary magazine Sport in 1998.

Where We Say We Are (2000) is a collection of poetry, prose and letters from friends that centre on the Pacific Ocean and lives lived in and around it.

Hawken's latest volume, of selected and new poems is Oh There You Are Tui! (2001).

Hawken had a poem included in Shards of Silver (Steele Roberts, 2006), a book investigating the interplay between photography and poetry.

One Shapely Thing, is a collection of new poems and two prose journals. The result is to demonstrate much more clearly how her poetry is drawn from her life in both a public and global sense, and to draw together in fascinating new ways her characteristic themes of personal responsibility and social justice, and of living in and with Nature (from publisher's press release). One Shapely Thing has been shortlisted in the poetry section of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2007.