Title: When God Died

Author: Michael Hulse

In: Sport 8: Autumn 1992

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, March 1992, Wellington

Part of: Sport

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Sport 8: Autumn 1992

[section]

Hello. Are we back in Marvell's garden? Actually, no. Hawken's note points us to a source in the courtship of Inanna (the Sumerian goddess) and Dumuzi the herdsman. It is wise (Hawken strikes me as a wise writer) to return to first instances whenever we can, if only to remind ourselves that certain touchstones have weathered better than some of the ideas we've more recently invented. In the world's oldest myths, Hawken has found images that go effectively and beautifully with her modern revisionism. Small Stories of Devotion is a sensitive work of radical re-invention, a breathing, thinking, feeling book by a wonderful craftswoman.

I've been putting the word 'about' in inverted commas, as if I were keen on perpetuating contemporary squeamishness about implying that a meaning can be paraphrased. In fact Hawken, multi-layered and ambiguous and evocative as she is, can often be paraphrased. I don't say that's a prerequisite; but it's often a fact in her case. In Michele Leggott's case, the possibility is much more remote; she subverts language, the usual yokings of syntax, the forms in which what passes for thought is conventionally put into some kind page 135 of logical articulation. To judge by her practice, Dinah Hawken would agree with Donald Davie that syntax is the bedrock token of civil intent in human communication. Leggott wouldn't. Her post-Pound, post-Olson, post-Zukofsky aesthetic gives pride of place to the principles of juxtaposition and association. Reading her poems repeatedly, I've grown to like the charge of excitement that flashes through Leggott's language, and one poem in particular, 'The August Girl', which is 'about' a woman reading a book in order to review it and uses extended metaphors of swimming to define her progress, now seems to me as clear as day—which is absurd of me, because frankly it isn't. The lines I'm about to quote are from 'Deluge in a Paper Cup' and strike me as more typical of Leggott's work in the quality of resistance they put up to sequential, logical analysis but also in the vivacity with which Leggott paces herself: