"To tell what happened to you is not a poem," writes Governor General Award-winning poet Phil Hall in this, his latest collection, Niagara & Government. What a poem is: roaring calamity, wedding deceptions, sobriety, Charlottesville mobs, estranged sisters, folk art, poverty, puffery, work, names on cenotaphs, white space, white space, white space. These long sequential poems want to be spoken. They invite the reader to check her ego and sit with "the good stories that un-tongued us. "
Phil Hall has been publishing poetry in Canada since the early seventies and is the author of many books & chapbooks. His book of essay-poems, Killdeer (2011), won the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry in English, as well as Ontario's Trillium Book Award. He has taught widely, and been in residence at Queen's University, the University of Ottawa, Sage Hill, the Pierre Berton House (Yukon), and most recently at UNB in Fredericton in 2018-2019. He is a valued editor / mentor of poetry manuscripts. He is the founder of Flat Singles Press, and the Director of The Page Lectures at Queen's University.
I am sick of keeping upa quaint pretense of language optimismor some sloppy nod to the experimentalas if I had a new plan besides this urge this compulsion // to not be silent & to pattern