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The Little Seamstress
by Phil Hall
Toronto: ON: Pedlar Press, 2010
160 pp. $20:00
Phil Hall’s collection, The Little Seamstress is classical in a postmodern sense. Rather than sift through canonical books for hitherto unearthed nuggets, Hall looks for poetic beauty and surprise amid the detritus of everyday speech and language.
The Perth, Ontario, poet, like Robert Duncan, conjoins the unusual: “We chart our course by such aromatic flawed victuals: Down the Dark Streets Alone by Lilian Victoria Norden // A memoir of girlhood in the 1920s – her affair with Frederick Horsman Varley (self-pubished – unedited – Vancouver 1982). // The grease of the creature becomes graph-pikes & replicas – / design.”
Hall has a predilection for indirection, but there are also lyrics of absolute clarity: “if you have a choice – read to kids / without a schoolboard close at hand / to tick off which words have been outlawed // lean in to kids / read a monstrosity like a fire in the hand / a classic that was once outlawed.”
Nominated for the Governor-General’s Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize, Hall is a poet who, pleasingly, does what he pleases: “Airports began as heaven’s basements – they have evolved into prison-malls.”
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