The poems in Angel I. Hawkins’s VELVET are unashamedly romantic, charting a love affair from tentative first meeting through the exhilaration and intimacy of a blossoming relationship and on through marriage. Hawkins dedicates the collection to “the hearts of the romantic” and to the “unbudded heart, a heart untamed, unfathomed.” There is a fresh simplicity to her work. The lines read as if they are coming straight from her heart, unfiltered and open.
The book is divided into three sections: “meet-cute,” “steady,” and “forever,” which correspond to the stages of a relationship. Though it’s not explicitly stated, the reader can presume that these are autobiographical poems of love.
An early poem, “Crush,” explores the very early moments of a tentative relationship: the weighing up of whether to wait or to act on the first flickers of the heart. She writes, “there is more harm / not knowing you / a blank page can not / be edited / the canvas calls.” And from this moment, the couple grows closer. A later poem has the narrator pausing to wonder if they are more committed than the object of their affection: “Is the pounding of my heart too loud? / The lust gritted behind my teeth too telling? / The quiver of my lips too tempting?”
Eventually, the lovers consume each other fully, as revealed in the poem “Embrace”: “The billowy white sheets/ were the only witnesses of what we have done.” Then, later, an admission of release: “Mouths full from the intensity of / finally unleashing what we have always wanted to do / to each other / for each other.”
Though there are references and allusions to art and music—opera, guitars, jazz at a wedding reception, old vinyl, and jukeboxes—the best moments of Hawkins’s poetry are when she embraces the physicality of new love. Not in the obvious, carnal ways, but in the subtleties of changes in breathing and being. As she writes in the closing lines of “Night”: “I find myself / simultaneously/ in peace and in pieces / with you.”
In the self-effacing afterword, where the author describes herself as a “lowly, hopeless romantic,” she hopes a reader may find a poem here that they will revisit. VELVET is indeed worth rereading. And for those who like their poetry uncomplicated and heartwarming, it could well become a favorite collection.
Angel I. Hawkins’s charming and passionate VELVET speaks with honesty and an appealing immediacy to romance.
~Kent Lane for IndieReader