96 pages, isbn 978-1-927040-58-4, $20
Toronto ON: BookThug, 2013
Through nearly a dozen trade poetry collections,
Perth, Ontario poet Phil Hall’s poems have the durability and devastation of
koans, and the envy of poets who encounter them. Much like the books that
preceded it, his eleventh trade poetry collection, The Small Nouns Crying Faith (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2013), is
deeply immersed in the world and history, yet contained by neither. The Small Nouns Crying Faith borrows its
title from the poem “Psalm” by George Oppen, himself known as a “poet of
attentiveness,” a quality easily attributed to the more than three decades of Hall’s
work. Oppen’s small poem, originally published as part of the collection This in Which (1965), opens with “In the
small beauty of the forest / The wild deer bedding down— / That they are
there!” with the fifth and final stanza, that reads: “The small nouns / Crying
faith / In this in which the wild deer / Startle, and stare out.” Reading Oppen
and Hall side by side, the comparisons run deep—Hall composes poems from his
Ontario landscape, shades of his darker past, notes on his literary forebears
(whom he refers to as his “heroes”), numerous artifacts, and could just as
easily reference, at any point, the importance of pausing to listen for deer.
Genealogy
Our expedition followed her cold-tea stare
to chunks of
boiled turnip wrapped in waxed paper in a lunch pail
near camp that first night the shortest verse
in the Bible
was recorded
as her only expletive
*
Hectares from where her breast had proffered
the warmed bottle
was found a
cigarette rolling-machine wrapped in a clown costume
*
On our last out-bound day we came upon Royal
Family clippings
attached to
corn-stalks by bobby-pins all these
items (photos/articles)
we harvested & catalogued except the pins (rusted/discarded) note
little brown
saw-marks in the corners of the stiff ceremonies
*
From Gab’s-Gift-Unsubstantiated
to Skugog Island
an au pair …
Phil Hall has long been a
poet of deep attention, compiling and collecting into an accumulation of poems
that speak of artifacts and smallness, and a humanity rarely lived and
articulated so well in Canadian poetry. This is his first trade collection
since he won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the Trillium Award, aswell as being shortlisted for the Griffin Prize, for Kildeer (Toronto
ON: BookThug, 2011), a collection of self-described “essay-poems,” published as
part of BookThug’s “Department of Critical Thought.” Hall’s
latest collection of what have evolved into “essay-poems” continue to practice
a folk-local, examining the small, local and deeply specific, composing
striking lines and phrases that accumulate into individual pieces, as well as
sections of a far-broader canvas. Somehow, his lines manage to self-contain in
such a way that even a shift in the order might still make the entire
collection no less capable, breathtaking and wise. As he writes in the poem
“Plum Hollow”: “The failure of order is the work / disorder is not the work.” The collection
also includes a small pamphlet-as-insert, “Faith,” a poem-sequence composed up
of words and phrases plucked from the book as a whole, selected and rearranged
to reveal both something new, and something about the entire project.
I would celebrate every detail
now
I have changed my thinking on that
no such thing as not being at sea
the alphabet does not end or
begin
wild yet
this inextricable quickening
During
the Ottawa book launch of The Small Nouns
Crying Faith on June 2, 2013 as part of the AB Series, Hall suggested thatbeing left-handed, it was easier for him to read from the collection from back
to front. There
is such a great comfort to the work in The Small Nouns Crying Faith, one that knows the important answers
might only emerge from important questions, and the level of self-awareness and
self-questioning is remarkably rare and deep. If a pen falls in a forest, might
anybody hear?
They hate me in that province to this day
&
I them without reason
once years ago I was judge for a book award
&
didn’t pick the friend-to-all who was dying
it would have been right to give the prize
to
that last-effort by that decent man
but in those days I was all about the work
the work
which is not a sacred thing which is not even a thing
but
the tracings of a social pact almost
accidental
always incidental
grudges
age backwards elixir to plonk
our vowels are slackened
&
the folios unaligned
(“The Small
Nouns Crying Faith”)
A version of the second of the book’s five sections, “A Rural Pen,”appeared as a limited-edition chapbook with Cameron Anstee’s Apt 9 Press in 2013, a series of (as the author self-described in his
acknowledgements) “hacked scrawls,” lifting its title from William Blake
to write short and quick meditations with fireworks-momentum. What is
continually astounding about Hall’s writing, via his last few poetry
collections, is in the series of shifts, whether gradual or sudden, that bolt
through the poems. Move your way backwards through his work to the
award-winning Killdeer (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2011), to TheLittle Seamstress (Toronto ON: Pedlar Press, 2010) to White Porcupine
(Toronto ON: BookThug, 2007) and everything that came previous, and you will
begin to understand the differences in tone, mood and question. Urban
explorations and a dark rural history have shifted entirely to an ease and
sense of peace in a country setting, sketching poems and fences and birds. His
recent collections have continued his interest in exploring and questioning
through collaged-fragments of turned and twisted phrases, composed as
poem-essays, but more recently the poems have shifted into poem-essays that
explore the purpose, means and goals of the writing itself. Precision is an
essential quality to Hall’s poetry, even as it discusses the impossibilities of
such precision. The poems question, respond, reiterate and shift, as the hand
that scrapes the rural pen moves throughout the world, working to ask exactly
what the meaning precisely means, and if that is even possible.
It can’t be October
in the stove I
burn old New Yorkers
(but always save the William Steig covers)
lake light
quavers
leaning as it again mulls over
the smoke-darkened
Rene de Braux painting
Chris benisoned walls with / now I get to
a man / a cattle-gad on each shoulder
half-way / no hurry / a Roman bridge
(double arches / quick weed-hints)
a
stuccoed villa set in along a hillside
Ann has taken
the Wolf River apples down to Margaret 92
mornings I try to read page-shaped ash
a quote my fire
preserves all night
from columns it has only one use for now
riven by passion, not profit. We contin
(“Claver”)
Hall’s isn’t a poetry carved into perfect diamond form, but a poetry
whittled from scores of found material to be arranged, pulled apart and
rearranged. The poems are important for what they know, what they ask and
reveal, and they might tell you, if you know to listen.
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