West of the Backstory

"Tim Hawkins has traveled far and returned to tell us what he saw. His outward journeys find a parallel in his equally exotic inward wanderings, in visionary reveries of the people and places he has loved. In a way these are almost all love poems by a man with a burning passion for existence, fraught though it may be. The intoxicating intersection of inner and outer is where many of them live, mingling the careful observations of the senses with the modifications of memory so that we experience each scene, each character (including his own, about which he is unsparing), from multiple angles and in the completeness of time. Whether he's writing free or formal verse, this approach makes it almost holographic and often quite memorable, as in this brief example, a poem called "What Have I Done?": "No real food or sleep for days- / only doll's head tea in a rusty bucket / brewed with scalding tears.""--