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

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Time, in our own century, is relative to the beholder. A bee is a bee is a bee, and it gets on with whatever bees get on with. Marvell of course knew that page 134 bees don't run to the same schedule as we do—he wrote of 'its time', after all; and Allen Curnow, adapting Marvell's dial in the opening lines of 'Keep in a Cool Place', emphatically had his tongue in his cheek when he wrote, 'A bee in a bloom on the long hand of a floral / Clock can't possibly tell the right time'. But Dinah Hawken, in her sequence 'The Harbour Poems' which ends and recapitulates her new collection, has gone further, insisting quietly that time is a human concern, that it includes humdrum 'realities', and that bees are out there somewhere in a universe all their own, getting on with it.

Buzz, buzz, you might say. But there's more to Hawken's sequence, indeed to Small Stories of Devotion, than that. I've said 'The Harbour Poems' are 'about' the relation of words to the things of this world. They're also 'about' relief that the characters in my opening paragraph no longer call the shots. And 'about' tenderness and love. Immediately before that last sestet in which she rewrote Marvell's conclusion, Hawken had these four lines: