"Ralph Hawkins' poems minimise the gap of 'constructive effort' between the basic seeking of pleasure and pleasurable sensations, and the "mediated" pleasure of the poem. [...] He does not bother with stage-setting. Each poem launches us into a series of "direct experiences" from whose course we could work out the shape of the self experiencing them.Hawkins is not asking how experience happens, but by describing the course of a self he answers the question anyway.The course is one of attention, constantly switching on and off, jumping between planes; Hawkins' method is to eliminate whatever is not interesting, and his poetic line is as rapid, sporadic, shifting, polyvalent, slight and self-reversing as consciousness itself. [...] The removal of conventional connections leaves a vast space for originality: his style is located in the edits, the jumps." -Andrew Duncan