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Tell Me No More and Tell Me, first published in 1981 focuses upon the poet’s immediate surroundings, the Essex marshes and the small black timber framed cottage he lived in at the time. Looking back, after such passing of time, and the changes that naturally ensue, these poems capture the exactitude of the poet’s daily life and contemplations. They remain indelible of that formative period.
Ralph Hawkins’ poetry is yeasty and written where the meanings are made rather than assigned. Its impulse is towards the immediate, apparently unsynthesised event where thinking occurs moment by moment. The aesthetic bears some resemblance to close mic techniques, we are drawn near to the experience and all distractions are removed for the intricacies of pure resonance. It produces a poetry as tricky as consciousness itself and its rewards are some considerable distance from the prefabricated commonplace expression of lyrical epiphany. Here is a poetry that is expansive, often humorous and always anarchic. In Tell me no more and tell me Ralph Hawkins’ refusal to whistle along with the sanctioned doggerel of English poetry and its returns is startlingly evident, as it has been throughout four decades of creativity.
Tell Me No More and Tell Me was published by Grossteste Press, and was the author’s first full-length collection. Here it is again on its 40th anniversary.
