It Looks Like an Island but Sails Away

Ralph Hawkins has been writing poetry since the late 1970s when he was one of a number of radical poets gathered at the University of Essex. He now lives on the Essex coast at Brightlingsea. Of many publications the more substantial are Tell Me No More and Tell Me (Grosseteste 1981), At Last Away (Galloping Dog Press 1988), The Coiling Dragon... (Equipage), and his three Shearsman collections."Do you think there's too much archaeology? Too many people need to dig things up and find them out. It's not necessary to some people and more than necessary for others. There's an industry around it ... It's the doing that's important, not the knowing about the doing. Because that's second. So, obviously some poets are more articulate than others, but articulacy can hide things ... There's a lot about, sounds impressive but misses the point, floundering around. Maybe that's not what you should be looking at. So I'm not really interested in an archaeology of understanding ..." - (Ralph Hawkins, from an interview with Ian Davidson)