Diana Hayes
Biography
Diana Hayes writes from Salt Spring Island—the traditional and unceded territory of the Coast Salish First Nations and the Hul’q’umi’num’ and SENĆOŦEN speaking peoples. She was born in Toronto and has lived on the east and west coasts of Canada. She studied at UVic and UBC, receiving a BA and MFA in Creative Writing. She has seven published books, including Sapphire and the Hollow Bone, Ekstasis Editions (2023), Gold in the Shadow, Rainbow Publishers (2021), Labyrinth of Green, Plumleaf Press (2019), and This is the Moon’s Work: New and Selected Poems, Mother Tongue Publishing (2011). Her poetry has been widely anthologized, most recently in Rocksalt, Forcefield, 111 West Coast Literary Portraits, Love of the Salish Seas, Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds, YYC/POP Portraits of People, and Poems in Response to Peril. Her narrative photography has been featured in galleries in coastal BC and commissioned for book covers. Her practice of year-round ocean swimming inspired the formation of the Salt Spring Seals. She is the publisher of Raven Chapbooks, specializing in small edition poetry books by B.C. writers. Salt Spring Island has been home since 1981. www.dianahayes.ca
Poetics Statement
“The world of poetry was revealed to me when I was a child, growing up with an extended family that included my maternal grandparents. My grandmother recited poems often and trained my ear to the rhythms, the mysteries, and what I later called the language of the soul. I believe poems can arise from ancient or cellular memory. While researching family history and ancestors, I found that faraway landscapes, with unfamiliar dialects and narratives, began to surface in my poems.
Poetry became the nourishment in my survival kit during adolescence when I first began to write.
I would skip classes to sit in the library’s poetry stacks, lost for the afternoon in the writings of Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath. Poems became prayers and translations for adolescent melancholy and angst. In these early years, I was knitting stanzas into tiny home-made journals, scribbling as often as I could.
Dreams are as much the blood and pulse of poetry as Coleridge’s Xanadu and the River Alph. Without them, territories of the creative psyche would be left undiscovered and unwritten. My earliest poems excavated these dreamscapes. Learning the language of the dreamer’s world was essential to my poetic process.
Poems connect us. They are intermediaries when grief blinds us, when joy takes our breath away, when memories visit in the night and don’t leave a trace. Poems are rhythms of peace in a world of ancient battles. They offer refuge from the front lines when there is little to believe or trust. They offer a map to the heart, a path otherwise lost to our too-busy lives. Finally, poems are followed by silence, the space between words, the knowing that cannot be told with language. ”
Diana Hayes is smiling into the camera on a sunny day outside before a blurred backdrop of forested trees. She is wearing black-frame glasses, a bright orange and red seersucker scarf and a denim jacket.
Sample of Poet's Work
XXII
Old stone, noble and resting between tides.
No place for rumination or tears.
Breath fills the dark spaces on this arc of SYOWT beach.
The bowl, not a loving cup, you say. My head now in my hands.
Not sorrow but prayers rise under the moon’s opalescence.
Your reflection somewhere between Persia and dawn.
Grief is a two-legged crow hop, laughing.
Raven steals your laughter and then the sun.
Lockdown, lonely, old word acedia fills our days.
Written on stone walls in ochre or blood—a new century burns.
The porter drops my valise on the studio steps.
Icons or encumbrance. To what world have I returned?
Dreaming of Cats in the British Museum
I wake mid-dream on a bus in Bloomsbury in Great Russell Street
not knowing where I’ve been or where I’m headed.
I step out at the British Museum, beeline to the third floor and join the antiquities
Egypt behind glass, climb into the bronze mummy-case with the Cat of Abydos.
I dream deeper, board a solar barque berthed at the Port of Southampton
greeted by a clowder of feline passengers travelling to the afterlife.
The voyage arduous, I am green with the pitch and roll, a stowaway in mid-Atlantic
aimless and fixed on dead reckoning, twenty days at sea and not a single shore’s mirage.
I implore the ship’s falcon wise in his gilded cage, my breath locked in the underworld
eclipsed and languishing in a labyrinth of waves.
I trace celestial codes on a map while the falcon stretches wings
preens in riddles, chants from the ancient book of spells and rites.
Anubis with his jackal head and pointed ears whispers me awake, patron god of lost
and helpless souls, the weighing of the heart, a gilded ring in each ear.
I conjure Felis the brightest star with my dreamer’s eye and astrolabe
join the cats gathered in their Field of Reeds just as the museum doors unlock.
The Wild Absence of Time
Down by the tawny marshlands
a day like all the others lost
unseasonable and overcast
a third summer of pandemic’s gloom
I sit for the longest while
listen to the swoosh and sway
of reed canary and leatherleaf sedges
watch purple martins flap and glide
their iridescent geometry
of feathers in flight
persuade me to break free
from this measured path
where questions lurk and breed
slip from six o’clock news reels
hunt like no-see-ums
trailing me down to the marsh
I cast them away
like old winter socks
sink my feet down
in riparian soil
as sunlight’s last ripple
drops through amber sky
then paints an indigo
so deep and clear
leaving me to breathe
the scent of dusk
this holy earth
the wild absence of time.
Credits for poems:
All poems copyright ©Diana Hayes
“Ghazal XXII” appeared in:
Gold in the Shadow: Twenty-Two Ghazals and a Cento for Phyllis Webb, Rainbow Publishers, 2021
Sapphire and the Hollow Bone, Ekstasis Editions, 2023
“Dreaming of Cats in the British Museum” appeared in:
Calling to the Sun, Poems for Isabella Wang, edited by Stephen Collis, above/ground press, 2022
League of Canadian Poets Poetry Pause, 2022
Sapphire and the Hollow Bone, Ekstasis Editions, 2023
“The Wild Absence of Time” appeared in:
Sea and Cedar Magazine, Winter 2023
Sapphire and the Hollow Bone, Ekstasis Editions, 2023
Cover Art: [detail from]: The Frozen Sea Within, acrylic and collage by Phyllis Webb, March/April 2002, currently held in the collection of Robert McTavish.