‘My journal nearly lost / remembering’

Hawking the Surf
by Diana Hayes 

Vancouver: Silver Bow Publishing, 2025
$23.95 / 9781774033890

Reviewed by Harold Rhenisch

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This is a book of memories. They are living stories in the world. The poet, and others, walk through them. At the poet’s touch, they are alive again. 

I say “the poet” because they are tales of self and other without a dominant “I” exploring the reality we all know as infants: of being scarcely separate from world and awash in luminous perceptions. For Salt Spring Island author Hayes (Sapphire and the Hollow Bone), this capacity did not dim with adolescence. 

Scientific explorations of memory reveal a complex process laid down in many parts of the brain at once, retrievable from all, yet subject to degradation and transformation. Every time human memory is accessed, the emotional details and understandings surrounding its access adhere to it.

Hayes’ method of memory differs. As poetry, it makes memories into scenes. She shuffles them around over the years, but poetry, that releases memories stored in words, can release them over and over again. They might be received differently each time, but the first moment remains stable.

The effect is as brooding as the orchids of the fog forests of the Carmanah Wilderness. You can visit them today or fifty years ago. Your memories might have changed, but the forest is the same. You notice that with not a little awareness of mortality and the otherness of your self. Such a sense of wary wakefulness, loss, and re-finding, pervades this book. As Hayes writes in “Looking in the Margins”:

old Leechtown where I waded in a dream
sipped cool water in the margins

the bowl’s rim and my thirst attuned
an ouzel’s burbling medley of song

water-walker with feathered oars
diver on the brink of a stream

the old trestle’s coordinates lost
heavy with nostalgia and the scent of gorse—

Oh sleep, come back to the roost
I am all fog falling beyond the water.

The “I” becomes the world.

A technology that excels at this work is photography. It holds moments across time. It “minds” them. It keeps them fresh in any mind that apprehends them. As well, it is minding them, paying attention to them, and caring for them as a kind of memory outside the human mind. All these meanings apply well to Hayes’ poems and the sixteen photographs she uses to ground them. 

When people don’t mind photographs well and the names of people in them are missing, the people, very present, are said to be “forgotten” or “anonymous.” In other words, they become something other than individuals. That sense fills this book as well. An example is “My Journal Falls Open to the Lake,” where memory, journal, and heron form a momentary self stronger than the poet’s:

lean body diving
deep in that rust-hued water

a blue heron startled
crescendo of raspy squawks—

my journal nearly lost
remembering.

They are alive.

This ability to regard self and others externally is not dispassionate. Hayes is genuinely present. So are the poets Robinson Jeffers and Charles Lillard. Attached to their minding is a whole coast of the Pacific talking to North America, all bound by relationship to Hayes.

It is a poetic tradition. There are lots of these traditions in BC. Hayes’ own has roots in the tradition of West Coast poetry that sprang up in the 1970s. 

“Sprang up” is not quite right. Behind that sudden growth was a long gestation. Earle Birney and Ralph Gustafson followed A.Y. Jackson to the Rockies. Emily Carr went further. Resurgent Indigenous traditions went further yet. In there was Lillard, a boy in logging camps in Alaska, Washington and Oregon, in a western frontier lingering on through its last days. On the remote coast, Lillard read Jeffers.

In this tradition of mythic selves in exile, Lillard came out of the bush to study poetry at UBC in the 1960s, and met another American exile, J. Michael Yates, whose The Great Bear Lake Meditations explored the madness of Western selves confronting wilderness. It was a bit surreal. Lillard’s 1970 samisdat chapbook, Cultus Coulee (“The Bad Valley” in Chinook Wawa—likely a reference to Dante’s descent to Hell), bears a portrait of Lillard in the bush, with a rifle under his arm.

Hayes’ transition from Toronto in that decade was no lighter. She came west like Birney and Gustafson, but didn’t land in the mountains. She found the coast, right when Lillard was exploring Yates’ and Jeffers’ notion that the “West” had come to its end; it had expanded across North America until it hit the water. Blocked by the planet, it fell into existential crisis.

We are in the same environmental and social position today. In the 1970s, various BC poetic traditions tried to resolve it. Lillard’s way was to declare a West Coast Renaissance, not only of Indigenous culture but of Western culture finding new feet through the resurgence of human-landscape intimacy. Lillard’s close friend, the poet Robin Skelton, linked the effort to his scholarly specialty, the Irish Renaissance of the late nineteenth century. 

These things are of a piece. Hayes has explored her own Irish roots in a novella, Looking for Cornelius. Hawking the Surf itself opens into themes of estrangement, otherness, and travel in the Anthropocene, anchored by conversations with poet PK Page, with her poem “Planet Earth” always in the background like the sound of the sea.

Skelton added poetic traditions from the Hebrides. His early 1970s poem “Landmarks,” for example, placed his self in a dreamworld of Hebridean magic, which he used as a portal to walk to and fro into the moment of European contact and out of it, through a self eternal, changeable and other. He did it once. Hayes has made a life of it.

It has been a journey into wholeness. Hayes met Lillard when he was giving up on the Bush. His 1976 collection, Voice: My Shaman, is saturated with attempts to rewrite his north coast in Sombrio Beach west of Sooke. A central poem, “Rivers Were Promises,” bade farewell to the wild rivers of BC lost to the Kemano Power Plant. Of his poem, he wrote, “I caress these splayed books, / My only receipts.”

It is this encounter with the Coast of the West that Hayes honours and extends in Hawking the Surf. Each of its poems and memories are receipts of her early self, and Lillard’s, touched gently, and put in order, without diminishment.

The book gets its title, Hawking the Surf, from the verb for hunting with hawks. Hawks tamed for hunting, are, like memory, extensions of mind and hand. One hawks the desert. One hawks the land. Hayes hawks the surf. 

Other meanings for “hawk” include coughing up phlegm (perhaps after a near drowning) and hawking wares, selling goods with one’s voice. Those apply to this book, too.

Surf is the point where hidden land pushes the energy of the ocean up as curling waves, which then run out over a beach. The art form for that is surfing. As I mentioned, these things are all of a piece. BC surfing began at Sombrio Beach, where hawking the surf is to swim out to meet the energy of earth and sea and then to ride a comber in, cutting a perfect line across it. That’s poetry.

Hawking the Surf includes the young Lillard, in “Meet Me Here.” He rows out too far and barely makes it back in against the tide:

don’t be surprised
when sheets of rain

slap no warning
squalls that move

like the sudden pitch
of your old man’s skiff

when in that darkness
of northern winter

you fetched bait at Loy’s
corner store in Ketchikan

a boy thinking you were
a man, a man of the sea

while ice crystals formed
on your knuckles and you bailed

Time and loss have made Hayes the elder now. As elder, she includes Lillard’s other metaphor for boundaries of self and otherness: jabble, a word he loved, which names the line of chattering water between an incoming tide and an outgoing river. The ocean’s own surf.

Hayes also honours ouzels, a bird Lillard kept mentioning, that wades under water and then back out into the air, passing between worlds—a fitting spirit for poets in transition.

Jeffers (1887-1962) chose a different bird. With Lillard’s copy of Jeffers in her pocket, Hayes went to Carmel. That difficult, American individualist is most famous for his poems “Hurt Hawk,” about recognizing otherness and self, and “Rock and Hawk,” with its powerful emblem of a hawk, first hanging in the sky and then settling on a tower Jeffers had built of stone, reliving Yeats’ famous tower in Ireland. “Realist eyes,” Jeffers put it, married to stone, heralding it as an emblem which “failure cannot cast down / nor success make proud.”

To Jeffers, the impulse was imperious and stripped of sentiment. For Hayes, who has built this book out of her engagement with that tradition, the impulse is inclusive. Her self is not something to be defended from erosion. Poetry keeps the erosion from happening, in a self more than personal. That is wisdom. It is also a triumph.

Jeffers kills his hurt hawk out of mercy when he realizes that keeping it alive and subservient by feeding it is destroying the dignity of its true nature. That projection is invaluable as a foil for how fully Hayes incorporates it without being wounded by its disregard. She takes from it the surf: not violence but water striking beach stones and rushing out, chattering—talking. Hawking the Surf is that talk. 

It’s good to listen to her cut such a beautiful line across the thundering surf.

Harold Rhenisch has written thirty-five books from the Southern Interior since 1974. He won the George Ryga Prize for a memoir, The Wolves at Evelyn. His other grasslands books are Tom Thompson’s Shack and Out of the Interior. He lived for fifteen years in the South Cariboo and worked closely with photographer Chris Harris on Spirit in the Grass, Motherstone, Cariboo Chilcotin Coast, and The Bowron Lakes; and he writes the blog Okanagan-Okanogan. Harold lives in an old Japanese orchard on unceded Syilx Territory above Canim Bay on Okanagan Lake. [Editor’s note: Harold has reviewed recent books by Mary Dalton (ed.), Gary Geddes, Tom McGauley, W.H. New, Stephanie Bolster, Lorne Daniel, Sharron J. Simpson, Tom Wayman, Estlin McPhee, Al Rempel, and Hari Alluri for BCR. His newest volume, The Salmon Shanties, was reviewed by Steven Ross Smith.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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