Conjugation

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 always simple, by the precise ear we may arrive at the heart."--Judges' citation, Griffin Poetry Prize, 2006

"Phil Hall has come, by strife with words and their embedded values, to a technique of compression that reminds of Paul Celan's knotted poems: they beam straight through the skull... Poetry that recalls the organs of the body, that invents and compounds verbs, nouns and adjectives to reach toward what cannot be spoken, only named, if we use all the names, without censoring our hands' flutter."--Er n Moure