A collection of poems by Wendell Hawken. Books in The Argonne House Press Chapbook Series are limited editions of 500 serially numbered copies.
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About the Author
About the Author As a native of Washington, D.C., Wendell Hawken rode the Wisconsin Avenue streetcar home from school and remembers sheep grazing near Upton Street. A graduate of Vassar College, she moved to rural Virginia in the back to earth movement of the 1960s and stayed to raise her son and daughter. Retiring in 1991 from a career as an international marketing executive, Hawken lives on a farm in Loudoun County’s western tip, outside Middleburg, Virginia, with her husband Vaughn Clatter-buck. A skilled and dedicated horsewoman, she spends her days in the non-verbal company of cows and dogs and cats and horses.
Her recent poetry and reviews have appeared or are pending in The Chronicle of the Horse, Snowy Egret, Poet Lore, Bogg, WordWrights, Washington Review, Loudoun Art and many other publications. She has read her poetry at the Library of Congress’ Poetry at Noon, the Takoma D.C. Library and Word Works Miller Cabin series.
Wilbur, the cover’s pig, lives at Janet Hitchen’s place.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Wendell Hawken Sings With Mothertongue,
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This review is from: Mother Tongue (Paperback)
Reading the poems in Wendell Hawken's Mothertongue, one would never guess that this poet once made her living as an international marketing executive. Hawken's poems are both introspective and reflective, in that she can look out at the world around her, and bring it inside, where she twists it around within the realm of the personal and the emotional.Hawken lives on a farm in rural Virginia, and it is this external influence that appears time and time again throughout this collection of her poems. A "skilled and dedicated horsewoman" (according to her biography), the stables figure prominently in Hawken's life and poetry. Hawken's work is also steeped in the natural world. She is not just influenced by the farm she lives on, but by all the sights, sounds, smells and textures of nature. While much of her work is more philosophical and serious in its consideration of the "outside" world, Hawken surprises you here and there with playfully humorous pieces like "Ode to Spring": Go warm some stranger on his neck. But, it's not fair to leave out an example of one of her more lyrical pieces, "Walk With Dolphin", which I think has a lovely, dreamlike quality: You slice the waves to me A good portion of Mothertongue deals with familial issues, as you might expect from its title. In particular, pregnancy and childbirth, and her relationship with her own ailing mother. Hawken handles these sensitive issues with great care and subtlety -- sometimes directly addressing the issue, other times hovering discretely alongside the subject. I can read this collection repeatedly and discover new subtleties about its poems each time. It is certainly a worthy first book by a reflective and poignant poet.
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