Hawking the Surf by Diana Hayes
Silver Bow Publishing, 2025
ISBN:978-1-77403-389-0-9-4
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Reviewed by Margaret Sullivan

Hawking the Surf is an invitation for readers to reinvent their ideas about human relationships, the natural world and time and its seasons. Each poem in the opening title section includes the geographic coordinates for its setting. The reader is squarely placed in the longitude and latitude of the poet’s world. The DMS format (degrees, minutes, seconds) tells us the precise location of the poem, the direction we are facing, and leads us to discover where we are going in the poet’s story. Deeply compelling gray toned photographs accompany most poems. The photographs include the poem’s title, coordinates and lines from the poem, and the images create an integrated experience of word and image.

In “Otter Point Squalls” we are launched into a trajectory that begins in late summer and holds fast by the embrace of the sea and shore. We look back to a quieter time of ‘lazy glass-water days’ and find a partner who is present and not so present. And we learn their tragic story. The sky is imposing and readers live behind the moon and under the sea at the same time. Time and space argue with the poet. It all happens in nine couplets.

Hayes’s work is boundless in context and form. “Winter Solstice at Barrow” will send you, in four couplets, into the mind of a snowy owl who lives the poet’s drama with her, almost for her. You will want to be the poet onshore in “Old Man’s Lament” and consider with him his choices, his natural seaside legacies, his regret at having stored his mind in pages of poetry.

Part One of Hawking the Surf is a collection of nineteen lyric and prose poems, most of them written in couplets. Part Two: The Saddest Creatures on Earth, moves from the sweeping seaside to far reaching spiritual stories to very specific contemporary tales of people and animals. Every poem is a drama. “Three Haibun for the Northern Fur Seal” tells the gripping drama of a seal beached and wandering, his rescue, rehabilitation and release. The haibun are based on actual events in a seal rescue carried out by the Island Wildlife Natural Care Centre on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, where Hayes has volunteered for decades. A professional swimmer, her relationship with the water is primal and informs every poem.

In “Reading with David in Hospice” the poet shares another insight while witnessing end-of-life care for a friend in hospice, sharing stories of his time in the treeless tundra of The Barrens, where ‘mountain avens and cloudberries / carpets of crimson welcome all the senses.’  “How Do You Spell Joy?”, this reviewer’s favorite, told in the second person is a jarring command to live your life as it was born to be lived.  “Strip down at the ocean’s edge. . . Call your sisters. Count back from ten slowly. . .”

Diana Hayes’s life on the western shores of the Pacific Northwest, in and around Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands, is the backdrop for her poetry. She has published eight poetry collections, a spoken word CD, as well as a novella, Looking for Cornelius, Wipf & Stock/Resource Publications.

Diana Hayes is the founding publisher of Raven Chapbooks and publishes small edition poetry chapbooks, featuring British Columbia poets.

Buy this book: https://www.silverbowpublishing.com/hawking-the-surf.html

About the reviewer:

Margaret Sullivan is an American-Canadian poet, MFA playwright, and former consumer psychology professor currently based on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia. She is the founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Undiscovered Poets and the author of the poetry collection Mean Dogs and the children’s book Jacinta’s Orderly World. Her poetry has been published in literary journals such as Yolk and The Galway Review. She has collaborated extensively with visual artists—most notably, partnering with Salt Spring Island painter Jeff Lederman to create poetry that accompanies gallery exhibits.