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Author Statement
Dawn’s Incision is a full-length collection of poems that explores a queer relationship in all its blooming, uncertainty, and withering, and the resulting grief as painful and harrowing but ultimately restorative and healing. It is a collection filled with tenderness and love, as well as pain and sadness. Wedded to nature imagery and its birth, death and rebirth cycles – Dawn’s Incision aims to examine and interrogate the onslaught of grief as a “morning breaking at sunset.”
3 Questions
David Hanlon
INK: What most inspires you to write?
D.H: Art, cinema, and music. Confessional writers who explore personal vulnerabilities and aim to tackle stigmatised issues inspire and give me the courage to write about my own. Existentialism: my poems grapple with the human condition and what it means to exist. The soothing qualities of nature and its all-around-us beauty and fragility that echoes our own mortality.
INK: What does your writing routine look like?
D.H: My writing routine is sporadic: usually a germ of an idea will come to me from an image or a moment that impacts me on a deeper level and I will perceive a hidden or layered meaning in it. I then build a poem from this metaphor. It all happens quickly in a stream-of-consciousness kind of way.
INK: Name a favorite poem you feel everyone should read and why.
D.H: Mary Oliver’s ‘Wild Geese’ is an astounding poem I always return to and one I feel everyone should read. The breadth and universality of the poem is staggering. Its voice is so precise and confident in a way that reassures, humbles and centres you. It is filled with wisdom, tenderness, empathy, and hope.
Q&A with C.W. Bryan
C.W. Bryan: There is a likening, a constant parallel to the speaker’s experiences and those of natural beauty, like this moment “we wrap our arms around one another / tight wisteria twining tree trunks” or even the title, Dawn’s Incision.
Could you speak about your perception of the human experience, especially that of love and healing, and how it relates to the natural world?
D.H: The title of the collection (and of one of the poems in the collection) is a metaphor that aims to capture the contradictory and perplexing impact of a break-up that makes it so painful and difficult to process – the fact that the ending is also a beginning – “one that hurts” as the title poem expresses. A life with that person has ended and another without them has begun – all in one staggering moment, as the opening poem, ‘Changes’, expresses:
“I’m left unhinging / myself to a morning / breaking at sunset”. Ultimately, the grief process, painful as it is, can be healing and restorative and nurture resilience and compassion – as the title poem goes on to say “…an incision / is needed / for surgery.”
There is a lot of nature imagery in this book, lots of light vs dark, spring/summer vs autumn/winter, lots of flowers and birds. These natural wonders are the foundation of the collection from which love, and grief are explored. Love and grief are both opposites and intrinsically tied at the same time, the way the seasons or day and night are to each other; there is lots of birth, death and rebirth in nature which reflects the blossoming love, withering breakdown of the relationship and ultimate healing, so this natural imagery became the perfect metaphor for grappling with, expressing and further understanding love and grief.
As the wonderful poet Susan Richardson writes on the back cover of the book, “David’s poems are…tied in a beautiful and visceral rhythm to the fragility of nature.”
C.W. Bryan: In “Boxed-in,” you begin to play more with white space & concrete poetry. Did any inspirations, poets, or poems inform this creative choice?
D.H: I wrote ‘Boxed-in’ very early on in my writing career. This poem is around eight years old. Andrew McMillan’s ‘Physical’ was the collection I was reading at this time, and it had a huge impact on me and my writing. McMillan uses no punctuation and lots of white space. The way McMillan uses white space to express silence and pain and distance hugely inspired poems like “Boxed-in”. Danez Smith is another poet whose collections ‘Don’t Call Us Dead’ and ‘Homie’ have also inspired my use of white space and concrete poetry. The way they use white space to convey displacement, isolation, and uncertainty.
C.W. Bryan: There is a distinct lack of punctuation with very short enjambed lines in many of your poems. “Face-painting” and “A Bird Flew” particularly stuck out. They read very quickly, urgently. Do you think this pacing is crucial to the reading of the poem?
D.H: Many of the poems in the collection have very short enjambed lines, even the ones that express healing and/or tenderness – this is to allude to the precarious nature of love and healing in its aftermath. Grief and healing do not follow a linear process, and memories can be both painful and cherished: Dawn’s Incision takes on a fractured and disjointed narrative to communicate this.
I worked closely with my editor, Robert Frede Kenter, at Icefloe Press, on the sequencing of the collection, and he describes the poems as “fragmented and wondrous shards.” Each poem is like a memory – a broken piece of the relationship, of the love shared, and of the grief and healing process. Grief begins at the very moment we split from another – this happens so quickly, and the pain is urgent – I wanted to express this in the form and structure of the book – short lines to express the panic and the stifling felt in that knife-to-the-heart moment, that dawning of love’s ending.
