Hawking the Surf
New poetry with photographs by Diana Hayes
Silver Bow Publishing – December 2025
ISBN: 9781774033890 book $23.95
ISBN: 9781774033906 e book $9.00
Books can be ordered at any bookstore through the Ingram Catalogue (free shipping.) Print and e-books can also be ordered directly through Silver Bow Publishing website. You can also order a signed copy from me directly. Just send your request via the CONTACT tab on this website.
Many of these poems are steeped in the complex geography of the west coast of Canada, especially the Pacific Ocean and the waters around Vancouver Island. Whether you live there or not you will be drawn to how these poems make it clear that landscape and human relationships are intertwined and that it is impossible to undo that. There is much variety in the poetic forms used in this book: from ghazal to prose poems to tightly controlled lyrical poems. This variety of forms adds power to the book and makes it clear that beyond the complex forces of landscape there are strong human connections that lead to a deep belonging. These are poems that celebrate place and the discovery of self through landscape. Even if some of these poems began in the impulse of youth they have been enhanced by a lived knowing. The many photographs by Diana Hayes in the book help to ground the poems in real life.
–Robert Hilles, author of From God’s Angle, Don’t Hang Your Soul on That, and The Pink Puppet
Hawking the Surf is an invitation to wholeness, art in every breath. In wordsmithing wizardry from earth to sea, Hayes steers us through heavy storms, her call for compassion permeating as we battle mortality in the search for meaning. She evokes universal knowing, every leaf and wave realms of intergenerational connection, literary traditions woven like DNA, all of it alive. With symbolism seeping through photos like “Bridging the White Water” and close ups of roses and dragonflies, musicality hooks readers, then transports them beyond words to mood and time, to that space within, that paradoxical connection with eternity in moments of peaceful presence. Poems like “How Do You Spell Joy?” and “Walk the Labyrinth” invoke reverence, to open to the unique flavor of now, while others like “Memory of Wonder” are perceptibly restorative. “I see you in the apple trees next to the gabled shed/ climbing, always reaching higher…/ Know I will be there in the flowers—/dahlias, hydrangeas, dianthus, pansies,” Hayes writes of loved ones looking on, then passes the torch to readers, “Your hand now holds this pen—/your poem forms the song./ Sing now, I am not far on the wind.” For every connoisseur of literature and every emerging writer seeking the way—if you only buy one book of poetry, this should be it.
–Cynthia Sharp, WIN Vancouver Poet Laureate & Award-winning Author of Ordinary Light & Rainforest in Russet
In Hawking the Surf, myth is embodied in the particulars of place. Diana Hayes’s “pilgrim wander” leads the reader into a labyrinth through “the memory of wonder”: she paints a “olfactory, tactile” world of colour that is both keenly observed and gloriously illustrated. This collection soars, leaning into poetry as solace, “trumpeting alarm” for a gone world, lost and found, but always brought home. Hayes is also hawking her favourite poets, most beautifully “In the Garden with P.K.”.
–Penn Kemp, author of Ordinary / Moving; Lives of Dead Poets; A Near Memoir: New Poems
Diana Hayes’s Hawking the Surf consists of two distinct chapters in time: the first is based on her immersion in the coastal landscape of BC in the mid-seventies, and the second, “The Saddest Creatures on Earth,” moves through memories of childhood, family, and lost friends, bringing us into the labyrinth of the present. The bridge for these universal themes is her amazing photographic images that are paired with poems. In section two, where displaced elephants and a Northern Fur Seal are confined or landlocked, she presents a Japanese form, the Haibun,” that combines prose and a haiku with each poem. The unifying force throughout is her love of nature and animals.
–Susan McCaslin, author of Named & Nameless; Field Play; Consider
To step into the world of Hawking the Surf is to step into the mist and fog of ephemeral memories from the coast of British Columbia in the 1970’s, where Hayes “walked and paced with no moon to navigate”. Accompanied by her mystical photographs in endless hues of gray, the poems rest softly on the reader while carrying an emotional power that slowly wrenches the heart.
–Cynthia Pitman, author of The White Room; Blood Orange; Breathe; Broken
In Hawking the Surf, Diana Hayes has given us a mesmer, an exquisite, lyrical collection, poignant with her personal and literary past, and with the past of oceans, rocks, islands, the global environment. Despite clearly marked geographical coordinates for many of the poems in headnotes, Hayes, writes as “fog falling beyond water,” catching the reader off guard, drawing us in. Read this book and “savour (the) words slowly like it’s a matter of sur-vival.”
–Arleen Paré author of Absence of Wings; Lake of Two Mountains
Imagine a meeting between Robert Frost and David Attenborough, and they make poetry together. Hawking the Surf is it; a masterpiece that takes the reader on a grand journey to the Western shores on the wings of butterflies. As you travel through the latitudes, share in the memories and dreams of the poet, you will undoubtedly be carried on as this reader was. This is a collection that you will want to read again and again, something not so common with poetry anymore. It is full of emotions, passions, and realities that are most relatable to all of us. Although you may never have traveled to those realms, you are certain to experience them as if you had. The author gives us access to an entire natural world, and we want to hug it with all our might, love it, and preserve it, however much pain we may have to endure as we do so. This is a winner written by one but made for all.
–Fabrice Poussin, Professor, Shorter University, Rome, Geogia U.S.A. and author of: Through the Lens of Solitude; Forgive Me for Dreaming; In Absentia; Half Past Life; The Temptation of Silence
Video Poems from Hawking the Surf:
Poems and spoken word by Diana Hayes, videography by Leigh Hilbert
In the Galway Review:
Diana Hayes’ Hawking the Surf Is Art in Every Breath