Poetry Review
By Joan Gelfand
Love Song of the On(c)e Removed
Review: “Nighthawks”
by Katherine Hastings
Spuyten Duyvil press, NYC
2014
In the genre of cancer lit, we hear a lot from the
stricken, but from the loved ones of the
stricken? Not so much.
Katherine Hastings, a San Francisco native and
Northern California poet of significant standing
pours her heart into an exploration of how to live one
degree from a life threatening illness.
The diagnosis? It’s not fatal, but harm is rendered.
From “Wolf Spider: 3”
The surgeon’s eyes cast nets of dread. She pulls
The sonogram from its sheath. Her words
Leap on us
What bothers me most
We hang suspended
Is that the tumor
Between life and death
Looks like a spider
Cells line up like hairy legs, reach
In every direction
We are paralyzed in airless air.
Our spirits stumble toward each other,
Begin their navigation away
From the sickle of her tongue
The quicklime of her sentence.
Here is the visceral pain of lovers, sympathetic
nerves vibrating together, face hard truths.
Currently serving as Poet Laureate of Sonoma
(2014-2106), long time host of The Word Temple
Radio series on KRCB, an NPR affiliate, and founder of
the non-profit WordTemple Poetry
Series, Hastings’ WordSeries publishing concern has
published no less than David Meltzer and
devorah major. Hastings’ previous collection, “Cloud
Fire,” was enthusiastically endorsed by
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gillian Conoley and Daniel
Hoffman.
No end in sight.
“Nighthawks” is a glimpse through the lens of a heart
aching for both personal and global
losses. To be blunt: When it comes to the subject of
harm, we are all harmed. By the damage
parlayed upon the earth, by random violence, by our
own fears.
From Section 2: “Fallen Leaves : After Sandy Hook”
“We wait for the sun. Will it come through
our heavy sighs? Will we be cured of
This expanse – an angel apiece
Burning so far out of reach?”
About her work, Northern California poet Gerald
Fleming writes: “If there is such a thing as
fierce Buddhism, Hasting’s “Nighthawk” finds it.
Ironic, hard hitting and desperate environmental poems
have their turn: But as any Buddhist
knows: Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
From “Transients,” one of my favorite pieces in the
collection:
“The speed of earth’s decay unhinges us, we say,
stepping on the gas to get home …
wade safely into the swells of dream-illusion
our only struggle the share of whispering sheets…
the alarm is set and ticking.”
Why poems about a school killing and environmental
degradation work is exactly because of
what the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Stephen Dunn
wrote in his essay “Poems of Complicity and
Outrage:” “If we (both poet and reader) are not
surprised by the ending of a poem, it’s going to
end up polemical and didactic.” Hastings surprises us
with the strongly worded ‘the alarm is set
and ticking’ just after the phrase ‘share of
whispering sheets.’ The juxtaposition of sentiments
and hard and soft language wakes us up to the poem.
Managing the fear, anxiety and flat out helplessness
of being a person in a world at risk and the
lover of a cancer victim, Hastings calls upon her
strength and discipline – being fully present in
the moment, clearly committed to not becoming macabre,
or bitter.
From “Wolf Spider: 5”
“Yesterday I let sightings of comets and egrets
carry me like a good dream. Today I lean
against the memory of your voice…
I lean into the smell of you. Come home.
I thought I was stronger than this.”
What I love best in Hasting’s work is her blurring of
the boundaries between physical and
spiritual worlds. From “A Holy Day in New York City”
“Before us, in the forever dark,
each hour has had the light erased, except
for the light clung in our fists, kept
hot in our pockets, brought yesterday
from billions of light years away.”
By placing us in New York City and delivering the
image of star light captured and brought
home, we are set into two distinct worlds: The
physical and the metaphysical. This is good
poetry.
Hastings employs beautiful epigraphs, particularly of
Kenneth Rexroth. (The Holiness of the
real/is always there.) Rexroth, known to many as the
father of the Beats, was a leader of an
aesthetic revolution in the sixties. He brought Asia
to California poets – Zen and Japanese
painting, Asian philosophy and art.
There is much else here to recommend “Nighthawks.” A
long meditation on Hawaii’s music and
spirit world, an ode to Oscar Grant and many
meditations on nature and being. As of this
writing, Hastings has just signed a contract for a new
collection. We will await with anticipation.