Hawkey channels Trakl

Over at Bookforum, novelist Laird Hunt digs into Christian Hawkey's Ventrakl:

Christian Hawkey's hard-to-classify Ventrakl puts prose, poetry, and photographs to fascinating work as he attempts to draw closer to the early-twentieth-century German writer Georg Trakl. Trakl was more than slightly enigmatic in his own day—Great War medic, pharmacist, drug addict, blisteringly gifted Expressionist poet, and suicide at twenty-seven—and Hawkey (whose previous work includes the 2007 poetry collection Citizen Of) manages with great resourcefulness to both mitigate and highlight the cultural and linguistic gap between himself and his long-dead predecessor.

Let's take the occasion to read a Hawkey poem. This one is from his Book of Funnels:

Fräulein, can you

sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I drag my sleeping bag

into the meadow’s precise center
& crawl inside, head first. Fräulein, there is the stars’
ceaseless drilling. I close my eyes. Somewhere below me
a star-nosed mole cuts its webbed hand
on a shard of glass. I close my ears
& over my body the current of a young doe
eddies, ripples across the field, a low-lying midnight fog
swirling after her, falling back, suspended. I know you are close.
The scar across my cheek burns. I think of reentering

your atmosphere,
your long, burning hair

Don’t move. The slightest motion

& this landscape, erased by floodlights