Faces and Flowers: Poems to Patricia France
by Dinah Hawken

The cover of Faces and Flowers, Dinah Hawken’s tenth book of poetry, bears a painting of two young women. One looks up from the canvas and her eyes meet the viewer; the other turns away. It’s a fitting choice for a book that binds two artists together, one being Hawken, who uses this collection to explore the life of the other: Patricia France, the painter herself.

France began her painting career while living at Ashburn Hall, a Dunedin psychiatric institution, in the 1950s; as an introductory passage explains, she was Hawken’s father’s cousin. Despite these two degrees of separation, it’s clear that just as the two figures on the cover are turning away from each other, there’s distance between these two artists. Unanswered questions, directed at France, abound within Hawken’s poems – ‘What are they thinking?’ ‘Why are the flowers black?’ ‘What is it like to make colour?’ – and at several points in the collection, she delineates the differences between the events and preoccupations of her life and those of the painter’s: ‘We hear words you never heard: / climate crisis, ecosystem collapse, mass extinction.’ Yet this is a book that stitches these two artists together, illuminating their shared appreciation for the beauty of nature and their common attentiveness to the faces and flowers around them.

The collection is laid out thoughtfully, its squarish pages leaving plenty of space to allow France’s paintings and Hawken’s poems to breathe and mingle together. The paintings contain, as Hawken’s title suggests, many faces, mostly of girls and young women – often in pairs or threes – and a few bouquets of flowers in vases, painted in broad, fluid brushstrokes. In the work collected here, France’s colour palette is generally soft and warm. But more often than not, the faces are disconcerting, glancing furtively to the side or downcast in dismay.

One of the great charms of Faces and Flowers is the tone, carried across all poems, of gentle candour. Hawken’s voice is present and direct, though always kind. She never strays from her conversation with France. Sometimes, she betrays a near-desperate longing to find out more about the subjects of France’s work, or about her biography, than the limited facts that are available to her:

Are they the children you never had?
Are they the cousins of your childhood? My aunts?

Are they the child killed in the car accident
years ago and still haunting?

Are they the child embedded inside you
wondering and suffering? Don’t give me

an answer. Did your father leave you
or did he die? Did he strike your mother?

The question about France’s father – whether he passed away young or left the family – is one that biographers have been unable to answer. Here, it’s one that becomes intermingled with Hawken’s interrogation of one of the book’s most haunting paintings: a child with pallid, blotchy skin, neck elongated, eyes closed, face tilted up and away, seemingly laid out on a stark blank background. We can try to fill in the blanks in France’s story with imagined scenarios, but perhaps it’s more truthful to let the questions and the painting sit side by side in shared starkness. ‘Don’t give me / an answer.’

Where a facing page does not contain a painting by France, it houses an excerpt from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. This long poem, Hawken explains in her notes, was held close by France as she painted: she would often listen to a recording of it as she worked, and she used many of its lines as titles for her paintings. Eliot’s poetry adds another layer of texture to this collection and further illuminates the unbridgeable distance between living poet and deceased painter: ‘what you thought you came for / is only a shell, a husk of meaning’.

It’s difficult not to be charmed by Hawken’s delight in the natural world, as best displayed the poem ‘We cannot think of a time that is oceanless…’:

Nature in the end – or in its infinity –
lives on a wave-length of renewal

like the small taupata I saw yesterday
growing from the top of a rotting post.

How can leaves have such shine and be so green?
How – in a world of waste – do they still emit light?

We zoom right in from the boundlessness of nature writ large to a sprig of leaves on a rotting post, and in doing so, we wonder at each equally. Hawken wants her reader to focus on what they might often overlook; to take the time to revel in nature’s beauty, which exists in defiance of our ‘world of waste’.

There are a few clunky moments throughout the collection which, from time to time, puncture the meditative space in which most of the poems hover. In ‘Change’, Hawken laments, ‘we’re in dire straits’, facing ‘climate crisis, ecosystem collapse, mass extinction’ and ‘caught in the leg-rope of corporations’, and imagines that France’s response to such chaos would be something like this: ‘listen to the young, / to the garden, to the nature and colour of words.’ As a line of reasoning, it’s more simplistic than satisfying, and leads to the whole poem, including the character of France and the voice of Hawken, flattening out rather than deepening.

On the other hand, when France’s own words, taken from the many letters she wrote over the course of her life, emerge verbatim in these poems, her voice is striking. Some of the most luminous moments of the collection see the painter describing herself as ‘Just a silly old lady painting silly old ladies’ or reflecting that ‘It’s odd to be a younger painter when one is old’. Hawken wisely ends one of the later poems of the collection, ‘Alone and not alone’, with a line from France: ‘Often I doubt so deeply, / but I have to keep on trying.’

Hawken describes these poems as ‘unrhymed sonnets’. It’s true they each have fourteen lines, and, to be fair, often that matter of length seems to be all that connects a modern sonnet to the earliest iterations of its form. Rhyme and metre are commonly discarded and rarely missed. Still, a sonnet pivots on its volta, its moment of turning – either inwards or outwards or in another unexpected direction. As I read Faces and Flowers, I wondered whether some of these poems could have played with that element of the form a little more daringly. Opportunities for the poet to argue with herself, or to take an abrupt turn into surprising territory, appeared more often than she has taken hold of them here. Most of the poems seem to know what they will say before they even begin.

But how closely these adhere to, or experiment with, the sonnet form doesn’t matter all that much, in the end. What unifies these poems is that each one seeks, with sensitivity and patience, to find out or at least gesture toward a little more of France’s life. Faces and Flowers is satisfied by its own wondering, allowing a connection to form between its two artists even in a maze of unanswered questions.

Hawken is a wholehearted, surefooted poet, a gather and protector of precious things that others may ignore. In this collection, she has gathered with great care what she could of Patricia France – her art, her life, and the questions and absences within all of it.