Niagara & Government

"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's first small book, Eighteen Poems, was published by Cyanamid, the Canadian mining company, in Mexico City, in 1973. Among his many titles are: Old Enemy Juice (1988), The Unsaid (1992), and Hearthedral ï?? A Folk-Hermetic (1996). In the early 80s, Phil was a member of the Vancouver Industrial Writers' Union, & also a member of the Vancouver Men Against Rape Collective. He has taught writing at York University, Ryerson University, Seneca College, George Brown College, and elsewhere. He has been poet-in-residence at Sage Hill Writing Experience (Sask.), The Pierre Berton House (Dawson City, Yukon), & elsewhere. In 2007, BookThug published Phil's long poem, White Porcupine. Also in 2007, he and his wife, Ann, walked the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. He is a member of the Writers' Union of Canada, and lives near Perth, Ontario. Recent books include An Oak Hunch and The Little Seamstress. His most recent book is The Small Nouns Crying Faith (2013). The Governor General's Award jury called Killdeer "a masterly modulation of the elegiac through poetic time."

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