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.