Peace & Quiet, Dinah Hawken
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026
cover: Kelly O’Shanessy

Today

turns ashen. The old men are waiting
to drive from the first tee. The poets are waiting
to hit the right note even through
a war and pandemic- in the same warm air –
permit no lyricism and no bright ideas.
A wave comes in. The wind stirs.
How casually we used to fit
into our endless lives.

Dinah Hawken

Dinah Hawken’s new poetry collection, Peace and Quiet, offers a compelling reading retreat, an extended version of Poetry Shelf’s Breathing Room, where you take time out from daily routine and news feeds and jagged edges, and breathe in the joy and delight and skin tingling rewards of poetry. Yet Dinah’s intricate collection is also deeply aware of people and planet issues that we are facing navigating challenging .

We begin in a room, waiting listening waiting, a dark room, mysterious, senses on alert, and this poem, this is poetry where everything, every line and every lithe word sings. We move into the real, beyond real, into fable, beyond fable, into the shifting oceans and sands outside, the appearances and disappearances, the sky, yes a beauty curtain the sky, the infinite possibilities for being, and from this waiting room, from this sweet poetry pause, let’s say contemplation, we step into poetry as song, as uplift.

Poetry as a song cycle where “life is the endless chanting of a choir / that you can join, she said.”

Senses are on alert to life: the dailiness, the quotidian that unfolds and continues upon the beach, the sound of a fire engine’s siren, to where the women who once held themselves back in restraint and hid their inner selves, now leave footprints in the sand, tracing their true nature. Children are born. Or maybe we flick sideways to where the woman in the street has a hidden gun. And back again to “She is listening to his breathing”.

Sea and ocean, and the water is an ongoing current we are drawn to, with its murmurings and welling ups and breathings and light and beauty and murmurings and sheen.

Quietness is to be on the other side of rain and storm, it is not speaking of “the rough and sombre days” they are hiding in between the lines where “beauty in the sheen of the sea / is indisputable.” Observed beauty and the nooks and crannies and wide sky of living. In the way light illuminates “time and place”. This precious moment. This beloved scene. Where old age and death are the ragged edges. And this: “and between waves a monumental second of silence”.

Peace. Holding hands with quiet and we are guided back to Parihaka. To Soome. To Archie Baxter. To non violence. Calling as we do and must and will for “a lull, a truce, // a ceasefire, a prohibition on the use of force.” Remembering “that an island of warfare can, / given time, become a sanctuary.”

There are so many pathways through Dinah’s stunning collection, so many glades to linger in, so many vantage points where you can stand or sit to absorb the shifting moods of sea and sky, so many trails into the rugged war-smashed greedy world, into living and dying, into aging and becoming, into mourning the dead. Into the ocean at fingertips and the mantra meditation. Still becoming. This living. This daily movement. So many hinges upon peace and quiet. On peace ahead of war. On the power and joy and tremble of silence.

I hold this precious book out to you so you may navigate your own pathways though.

June down under

The winter is reluctant to come.
The stacked wood
lies undisturbed, protecting wētā.

The only thing that won’t ice over
on the other side of the world
is the father’s heart.

He is digging in the rubble
with his bare hands
for a small boy.
A small son.

Dinah Hawken

Dinah Hawken is one of New Zealand’s most celebrated poets. She was born in Hāwera in 1943 and now lives in Paekākāriki. Recent poetry collections include Faces and Flowers: Poems to Patricia France, Sea-light, and There Is No Harbour. In 2025 she received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement.

Te Herenga Waka University Press page
Book interview with Morrin: Lauren Keenen, Dinah Hawken, Ingrid Horrocks
Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Morrin Rout chooses Dinah Hawken