Ocean and Stone

I went straight into the sea. I wanted its lift and cold, its salt, its curve and its breaking. I remembered its clarity. I loved its heartiness and with that I remembered the recent dead. Ocean and Stone, Dinah Hawken’s seventh collection of poetry, is a book of many elements. The central sequence page : stone : leaf, interspersed with the striking drawings of John Edgar, is framed by poems of growing up and growing old. They, in turn, are framed by poems written in the natural world, beside a lake and beside an ocean. At the heart of this book is urgency: the urgency to know the limits of our planet and ourselves, and to live within them. Ocean and Stone is elemental Dinah Hawken, at once meditative and resolute.