A Fancy Breeze Gets Up

Author: Ralph Hawkins Publisher: Shearsman Books (2022) A Fancy Breeze Gets Up collects together the poetry written by Ralph Hawkins since 2015 and the publication of It Looks Like An Island But Sails Away. In 1978 in his first book, English Literature, and before the concept of trigger warnings arose, Ralph Hawkins announced that he quite liked The Waste Land, it’s ‘like holding a gun at an ordinary/everyday person.’ His own poetry has maintained a variously combative Modernist verve since then, and whilst no one has been threatened or shot because of it, it is a risky, occasionally disquieting and humorous poetry which challenges and rattles the possibilities of poetry itself. A Fancy Breeze Gets Up exhibits these qualities abundantly in three different ways in the three parts of the book. Part 1 is a set of dispersed, incidental staccato lyrics which pivot lightly on engagement and displacement by disorientating turns. If the reader requires grounding it comes with part 2. ‘Deceit D