It Has No Sound and is Blue

Winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Time Published Poet

Most of the poems in this collection, Dinah Hawken's first, were written during a three-year period in New York in the mid-1980s while she was studying for a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Brooklyn College and working with the homeless and mentally ill. The volume's centrepiece, 'Writing Home', is a sequence of sixteen unrhymed sonnets, formally modelled on James K. Baxter's Jerusalem Sonnets, but focusing on women's issues, specifically the need to achieve a state of inner balance in a world under threat.