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Poetry. The term "conjugation" refers to more than the obvious grammatical movement of pronouns through time (I am / you are / they will be). For, in Biology, it also refers to the transfer of information between cells. And CONJUGATION--the new collection of poetry from award-winning poet Phil Hall--sees an open realm where individual letters inside a word are each rolling through their possibilities, from A to Z. Thereby, the language in this, Hall's fourth collection of poetry to be published by BookThug, travels into and out of itself, as he says, "escaping my ego, while revealing, word by slightly different word, my deeper connections and disconnections to things--to what used to be called poetry's 'subjects.'" As much care was taken with the writing of this collection as the shaping of the poems themselves. Replete with images of the natural world and in some cases, the mechanisms that transform it--horses, leaping fish, trees, canals and locks--CONJUGATION signals a return to the nature/nurture elements that have wound their way through his earlier collections, but also a versed ode to the discouragement that many Canadians have felt about the progression of their country and government over the past number of years.
"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 hand-tool, 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 a
About the author
Phil Hall is a writer, editor, and teacher. His first book,
Eighteen Poems, was published in 1973. Among his many published titles are:
Old Enemy Juice (1988);
The Unsaid (1992);
Hearthedral-A Folk-Hermetic (1996);
An Oak Hunch (2005); WHITE PORCUPINE (BookThug, 2007); KILLDEER (BookThug, 2011; winner of the 75th Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry and the Trillium Book Prize, and shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize); SMALL NOUNS CRYING FAITH (BookThug, 2013);
Guthrie Clothing: The Poetry of Phil Hall, a Selected Collage (2015); and
My Banjo and Tiny Drawings (2015). Hall has taught writing at York University, Ryerson University, Seneca College, George Brown College, and elsewhere, and has held the position of Poetry Editor for BookThug since 2013. His newest book, CONJUGATION, was published by BookThug in the spring of 2016. Phil lives with his wife near Perth, Ontario.
