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DINAH HAWKEN was born in Hawera, a small New Zealand rural town, in 1943. She has lived in Wellington for over 30 years, interspersed with three periods in the United States, two in New York City. For 20 years she worked as a student counsellor at Victoria University. Her four books of poetry, published by Victoria University Press, are It Has No Sound and is Blue, which won the 1987 Commonwealth Poetry Prize for “Best First Time Published Poet”, Small Stories of Devotion (1991), Water, Leaves, Stones (1995) and Oh There You Are Tui!: New and Selected Poems (2001).
Of “365 X 30”, she writes: “It amused me to have this dream at the time of our 30th wedding anniversary. As you can see and hear, the poem is a very straightforward description of the dream up to the last two lines. The image in the second-to-last line was in my mind for months after I had had the dream and written the rest of the poem, but for some curious reason, which often happens, I wouldn’t take it seriously. Then I realised, suddenly, that this spontaneous and concrete image was what I’d been looking for all along. Thirty years along.”
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