Reading the poems in Wendell Hawken's Mother Tongue, one would never guess that this poet once made her living as an international marketing executive. Hawken's poems are both introspective and reflective, in that she can look out at the world around her, and bring it inside, where she twists it around within the realm of the personal and the emotional.
Hawken lives on a farm in rural Virginia, and it is this external influence that appears time and time again throughout this collection of her poems. A "skilled and dedicated horsewoman" (according to her biography), the stables figure prominently in Hawken's life, as is evidenced in "Morning Stables", where she steps back and marvels at her own life:
Dew dampening my boots,
I bring two horses in, easy-gaited to their stalls
No injuries last night.
Can you imagine -- Here I am!
It's how I really live.
With horses all around!
Hawken's work is also steeped in the natural world. She is not just influenced by the farm she lives on, but by all the sights, sounds, smells and textures of nature. While much of her work is more philosophical and serious in its consideration of the "outside" world, Hawken surprises you here and there with a playfully humorous piece like "Ode to Spring":
Bitch, you think
I'll frolic in this chirp and warm
as mockingbirds disturb peach trees
and privet hedge? Or aaaahh
as leaves turn tongues to lick the sky?
Go warm some stranger on his neck.
Or agitate a chickadee.
They're easily excited.
I've gotten quite accustomed to my early dark.
But, it's not fair to leave out an example of one of her more lyrical pieces, "Walk With Dolphin", which I think has a lovely, dreamlike quality:
You slice the waves to me
with greetings white-lipped wild
as cells in me, certain cells remember
dorsal dark
and breath above the eyes...
A good portion of Mother Tongue deals with familial issues, as you might expect from its title. In particular, pregnancy and childbirth, and her relationship with her own ailing mother. Hawken handles these sensitive issues with great care and subtlety -- sometimes directly addressing the issue, other times hovering discretely alongside the subject, as in these lines from "Visit to My Mother":
It's time to plump her pillows up
and open bedroom shades on afternoon
to notice how my mother's bones
turn bird-bone airy in her bed
as her hands go round each other
all day washing her hands with air,
my father's ashes in their urn, his socks
still paired and folded in their drawer.
The longest poem in the collection, "Sonograms", is told in five parts, with each focused on a different stage in an unnamed mother's pregnancy. This is perhaps the most poignant and complex of the poems in Mother Tongue. Hawken weaves a tale of two mothers -- the unnamed one and herself -- and in doing so, weaves a story of motherhood itself.
I can read this collection repeatedly and discover new subtleties about its poems each time. It is certainly a worthy first book by a reflective and poignant poet.
