Breeze Block, Jake Hawkey
Lumpen / The Class Work Project, 2021 £5.00
In the grand scheme
I was struck by the number of times Jake Hawkey mentions ‘Jesus’ and ‘God’ in these poems that otherwise chart gritty London experience. The second poem, ‘Laughing Poem’, introduces this theme:
I don’t know if I believe in God, but I want to.
My counsellor says I repeat I don’t know.
Three out of four of the so-called ‘Matchstick’ poems feature God in some way. These can be playful. In ‘Matchstick Poem 2’, ‘God is wearing a pink slip’. ‘Matchstick Poem 3’ opens with the couplet:
God does not mean for us to make his love
a never-ending exercise in misery.
The poem then includes God speaking to Moses and Jesus ‘walking on water’. ‘Matchstick Poem 4’ ends on the hopeful note: ‘God dwells in every man’.
The final stanza in ‘Jesus Christ on MTV Cribs’ describes God as: ‘the fountain / from which all springs’. In ‘Your Pose Is the Pattern of Falling Rain’, I enjoyed the references to Caravaggio and Titian, and the scene of ‘Nan’ sculpting: ‘Fag hanging between her lips.’
The final two lines of the poem then read:
God calls you by the name
your mother chose.
There’s further irreverence in the prose poem ‘Self-portrait with Jesus’s Donkey’: ‘Here we are donkey, pulling my old boy out from my boxers to piss on Christmas morning.’ And ‘Studies in Autumn, III’ — part of a sequence — opens with the image:
Jesus operating the lift to the top floor
that is God, luggage between each arm.
In ‘Guts of a Piano in the Rain Beneath a Block of Beautiful Brutalist Flats’, the poet muses that ‘Jesus’ and ‘God’ are among the words he uses most often in relation to his ‘freshly-dead Dad’, and he writes: ‘Jesus is collaborating with me (?!).’ While the poem ‘Parking Space’ closes:
in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus of Nazareth is looking up
lonelier than anyone has ever been; jejune silhouette of moon.
I can’t pretend I understand all these references. They do, however, stand out for me as unusual and note-worthy in a collection otherwise concerned with the challenges of urban life.
Sue Wallace-Shaddad
Fathers and sons
The narrator of ‘Laughing Poem’, admits ‘I don’t know if I believe in God, but I want to.’
In ‘Studies in Autumn III’, the narrator is sure ‘God lets us walk with a limp or two.’
The narrator of ‘Your Pose Is the Pattern of Falling Rain’ concludes: ‘God calls you by the name your mother chose.’
So there are plenty of references to God here, but what does God look like? There are a number of arrestingly descriptions of other people’s depictions (eg Michelangelo but not as we know him):
In Michelangelo’s
The Creation of Adam
God is wearing a pink slip.
God is a silky woman
with air between her legs.
[‘Matchstick Poem 2’]
Then there's a Rembrandt etching in which ‘the Christ is plump and ugly; / an ordinary man with greasy // bangs, sat ready to feed scraps / to a waiting scrawny dog’ (‘Matchstick Poem 3’). From this it’s clear that God’s son also features for this poet as a human figure.
One thing is clear: Jake Hawkey seems determined to give God (and his son) a human face. In ‘Parking space’, God is ‘looking up / lonelier than anyone has ever been’. In ‘Studies in Autumn III’, we find that the person who is ‘operating the lift to the top floor / [ ... ] is God, luggage beneath each arm’.
However, for me, none of this poet’s approaches to the divine come close to the way he captures the defining characteristics, gifts, faults and foibles of his own family and friends, especially his real human father.
In ‘Off the Back of a Lorry’, the poet’s father comes bopping out of ‘the tattooist on Margate beach with a Saint George’s Cross / on [his] calf, a close French crop and sweating McMilkshake’.
The love Jake Hawkey expresses for his father is as real, unsentimental and stark as a breeze block which, I believe, is literally the ashes of coal or coke bound by cement, moulded and used for building.