Phil Hall

These are poems of ferocity and humility, of vulnerability and wit, poems whose skilled complexities elucidate the lyric disturbance of melody, memory and self. Grasping his intimate line like a kind of loved and fortuitous handtool, what Hall constructs is a voice that attends to the familial and psychic histories submerged in landscape, in all their bitterness and gorgeousness. There is a rough amplitude in his compositional principle: that ‘between the body & language/ a ravine of call and response’. In this work, out of the uncertainty and lag of dailiness comes the knowledge that although precision isn’t always simple, by the precise ear we may arrive at the heart.

Straddling the thin line between argument and lyric, the ‘Essay-Poems’ of Killdeer are deceptively prosodic, and can switch from the stark and factual to short flights of startling, gorgeous lyricism: ‘Killdeer on my oozing stumps … Whipped the years’ butcher block rings to crèche shavings … Her desperate ruse has settled into gunwales – her closed cry a prow’s nib.’ Suspicious of artifice, surgically self-evaluating, Hall’s poems at once pay tribute to writers and friends who have shaped his sense of integrity while analyzing his own progress and methods as an artist. A record of private and imaginative growth, Killdeer builds a powerful narrative of recognition, attesting to the introspective mind’s capacity to transgress pain. This document of the examined life, through its hard-nosed accretion of realizations, is remarkably moving as it rows tenaciously between ‘islands of repair.’ Full of unease, gratitude, humour, intellectual and personal challenges, and not without bite, Killdeer is a testament to the creative life as an act of faith and transformation.