Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Killdeer Essay-Poems by Phil Hall Killdeer: Essay-Poems by Phil Hall. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 660be45f8b1bd6fd • Your IP : 116.202.236.252 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. Galatea Resurrects #18 (A Poetry Engagement) Presenting engagements (including reviews) of poetry books & projects. Some issues also offer Featured Poets, a "The Critic Writes Poems" series, and/or Feature Articles. Tuesday, May 15, 2012. KILLDEER by PHIL HALL. rob mclennan Reviews. Killdeer by Phil Hall (BookThug Department of Critical Thought No. 4, Toronto, 2011) Our national bird – for years – was – as A M Klein said – the rocking chair. I don't know what our national bird is now – but my totem bird is the killdeer. Its names – odd mannerisms – & cry – explain bits about me – in riddles “A Thin Plea” Published as a collection of “essay-poems” as the fourth title in BookThug's Department of Critical Thought comes Perth, Ontario poet Phil Hall's Killdeer (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2011), which went on to win the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. In an essay a few years ago, published in my subverting the lyric: essays (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2008), I talked about the thread of the Killdeer that wanders through some three decades of Hall's poetry, so the fact that Hall would admit the Killdeer as his “token bird” in this collection is an interesting thing, taking the bird from a trace to a focus. One of the features of the Killdeer, a medium-sized Plover, is its deception, distracting predators with a fake “broken wing” away from hidden nests. Hall might not be working deception, but distraction, perhaps, writing poems that require strict and careful attention, so as not to miss an essential point, distracted by an otherwise line of broken wings. Since moving back full-time into rural Ontario from his Toronto base a couple of years ago, Hall's poetry has evolved to re-embrace the positive about rural spaces, looking positively in both directions, and far less dark than some of his previous references to rural spaces. His rural evolution has come through the books, working from the Griffin-nominated An Oak Hunch (London ON: Brick Books, 2005) through to White Porcupine (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2007) and The Little Seamstress (Toronto ON: Pedlar Press, 2010), with the latter seeming to be his first Perth collection. The shifts in his writing seem even deeper, when one recalls the dark content of childhood abuse in his collection Trouble Sleeping (London ON: Brick Books, 2000), to the opening lines of the first poem of Killdeer , “Adios Polka,” that writes, “Whenever I get lost / Ontario does not wound me.” At the same time, what could be read as distance between two points, could simply be nothing contradictory in the least. It was in fact Ontario itself, which never wounded him. When Layton says – in the last line of The Bull Calf – I turned away and wept. He is flaunting an emtional – sexual – poetic – & political superiority. He is pointing to his own larger – freer – feeling – the line is theatre – not truth. We may think we have broken through the sentimental – into a raw & beautiful truth. The unsayable zinger feels like health – transgression is vitalizing. Startling – quotable – epigraphic – but the truth is always more complicated. Or sight-to-the-blind simple – as in Basho. Killdeer exists as a collection of sequence-essays, twelve in total, with smaller pieces bookending the pieces, writing on becoming a poet, visiting the writer Margaret Lawrence, on Nicky Drumbolis' infamous Letters Bookshop, Bronwen Wallace (for a conference on her work), Daniel Jones and Libby Scheier, as well as numerous other threads, directives, insights and passages that meander along almost folksy byways. A number of the pieces have appeared previously over the years as, among other places, an essay for AngelHousePress, and chapbooks through above/ground press and BookThug, reappearing here in much altered forms. Much like Prince George, British Columbia poet Barry McKinnon, Hall's response to any request for an essay or other writing is to compose a poem, and both writers have slipped such pieces throughout their poetry collections, so it becomes interesting to see Hall become more overt in his admission of just what these pieces include. It's an idea Hall shares with his friend and contemporary Erin Mouré, that poetry and essays don't need to be separate entities, and can often be their best thinking form. Many forget that Hall and Mouré started out in Vancouver as “work poets” alongside Tom Wayman and Kate Braid, both now part of a consideration of “work poetry” that might not include the straight narratives of Wayman (I've seen essays by Wayman that rail against “language” poetry, even as he proclaims the worthiness of “work writing”), but include, instead, a healthy blending of both “work” and “language” writing, forms also explored by west coast poets including Jeff Derksen, Stephen Collis, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Peter Culley and Aaron Vidaver. There is a comfortable ease and delightful curiosity to Hall's writing, generally, moving slowly through a dozen provocative essays in his considerations of how one exists in writing, amid friends, influences and contemporaries, and in the larger world, each circle larger than the previous. In many ways, Phil Hall might be Canada's only worthy “folk poet,” encompassing the best of what folk art is meant to be, self-taught and working-class, as he carves poems from a collage of phrases, lines and stanzas, while still managing to produce a highly-crafted “high” art. Phil Hall's Killdeer wins $20K Trillium Book Award. Perth, Ont., poet Phil Hall has scooped up another honour for his collection Killdeer – the $20,000 Trillium Book Award. Winners of the Trillium Book Awards, an Ontario prize for the best book and best poetry collections in English and French, were announced Wednesday night in Toronto. Hall won the Governor General’s Literary Award and was nominated for the prestigious Griffin Prize for Killdeer, a meditative collection that charts his own progress as a writer. His essay-poems muse on the poetic process, what he terms his "sururalist" roots, and offer homage to fellow writers such as Margaret Laurence, Bronwen Wallace and Libby Scheier. The collection is published by BookThug, a one-man publisher that specializes in verse. This year’s English-language winner of the Trillium Poetry Award is Toronto-based Nick Thran, who won for his second poetry collection Earworm, published by Nightwood Editions. His poetry deals with urban life and cites modern cultural touchstones from Picasso to Jessica Rabbit to the Smurfs. Poets who have published up to three collections are eligible for the Trillium Poetry Award, while veteran poets, such as Hall, are eligible for the book award. The Trillium Book Awards in French went to: Book award : Michèle Vinet, Jeudi Novembre (Éditions Prise de parole). Poetry award: Sonia Lamontagne, À tire d’ailes (Éditions Prise de parole). Winners of the Trillium Book Award in English and French receive $20,000. Publishers of the winning books each receive $2,500. Winners of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry in English receive $10,000 and their publishers receive $2,000. Self-examination through verse. The title page of Phil Hall's Killdeer , this year's winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry, includes the subtitle “Essay- poems”—and true to that term, it's a series of musings threaded with quotes from other writers and thinkers and yet also “poetic” in their idiosyncratic turns of phrase and striking metaphors. In essence, Hall is examining his formation as a poet and the influence of his hard-scrabble upbringing in the Kawarthas area of Ontario: the “home-scar” he carries, as he puts it vividly, and his attempts “to hunt for & invent a literary family to/replace the one I had been born into & couldn't abide.” Hall, who now lives near Perth, Ontario, has been writing poetry since he was a teenager. His first chapbook, Eighteen Poems , was published in 1973, and though he had an inauspicious start (one poet wrote of his debut effort, “far from giving me any pleasure this book almost made me puke”) his later work has been well received. His collection Trouble Sleeping was a finalist for the GG in 2001 and An Oak Hunch made the Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist in 2006. In the course of his reflections, Hall plays elegiac tribute to his “literary family,” including Margaret Laurence (who treated him kindly when, as a naïve 19 year old, he dropped in on her unannounced with a sheaf of his fledgling poems) and Bronwen Wallace, the feminist writer whose narrative poems of motherhood and the nuances of sexual politics helped establish these subjects as legitimate themes in CanLit. Wallace had a distinctive poetic voice, as does Hall. He supplies an apt description of his own style when he cites the writing of “a terroir-ist” as “locally quirk-private.” His rural upbringing echoes in the rhythms that he begins to identify as peculiarly his own: “I can hear old fiddle tunes— pluck & moan—& animal noises—/bounce & skate.” Throughout Killdeer , Hall digs at the origins of that distinctive voice and challenges its autobiographical sincerity as a form of artifice. At one point, he cites an early poem and takes issue with the fact that it “didn't ring clear in its flaw-rhythms—until I scraped down to the/rage-line.” Elsewhere he repudiates both “the thousands of poems that get pared down to thin polite/columns of memory in writing workshops every summer” and “blunt confessional Punk/animations” meant to shock. But Hall is hardest on himself. In “A Thin Plea,” he calls the killdeer his “totem bird” because of its plaintive cry “that says here I am here I am” and its capacity for dissembling: when its nest is threatened, the bird pretends to have a broken wing in order to lure any predators to come after it instead. Hall relates the bird's play-acting to the manipulatively emotive in lyrical poetry (“my pain—my pain—at first that was what I thought poets said. now sometimes I don't mean it—but I say it anyway.”) Stylistically, Hall's work is halting, studded with dashes that, in effect, replicate the laborious and painstaking progress of his thinking. At one point, he takes issue with poetic forms that “dummy-down/the complexity of impression/expression.” Killdeer is the exact opposite, a meditation on the poetic process that stimulates both the intellect and the imagination. Phil Hall (poet) Phil Hall in 2010. Photo by Justin Morabito . Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia Commons . Phil Hall (born September 18, 1953) is an award-winning Canadian poet. [1] Contents. Life [ edit | edit source ] Youth and education [ edit | edit source ] Hall was born in Lindsay, Ontario, and grew up on farms in the Kawartha Lakes region of that province. [2] Career [ edit | edit source ] Hall has taught writing and literature at York University, Ryerson University, the Kootenay School of Writing, and a number of other colleges. He has been poet in residence at the University of Western Ontario, the Kingston Writer's Workshop, The Sage Hill Writing Experience in Saskatchewan and elsewhere. [2] In the 1980s he lived in Vancouver, where he was active in the Vancouver Industrial Writers' Union and the Vancouver Men Against Rape Collective. [1] After returning to Ontario, he taught poetry at George Brown College and English at Seneca College, both in Toronto. [2] He was literary editor of This Magazine . He has been publisher of a small press, Flat Singles Press, since 1976. Writing [ edit | edit source ] Canadian Encyclopedia: "Phil Hall's earlier books from the 1980's and 1990's . engage the tradition of confessional poetry. Drawing on painful memories of a dysfunctional family, Hall explores gender identity, sexual abuse, romantic relationships, alcoholism in his family, his parents' deaths, and his life as a developing writer. He attempts to come to terms with the psychological scars from his past by confronting them in poetry of gritty realism. This approach has earned his poetry the rubric 'Ontario Gothic'. "In the pivotal collection Hearthedral: A folk-hermetic (1996), Phil Hall's poetic shift becomes more apparent. It shows his transition from relatively accessible poetry using colloquial realism into more complex language reminiscent of James Joyce's wordplay in Finnegans Wake and Gerard Manley Hopkins' richly descriptive poetry. The collection demonstrates a change from the poem crafted as unit to untitled sequential writings valuing process over product. In subsequent books . Hall continues in this stylistic direction while retaining his connection to autobiographical material." [1] Recognition [ edit | edit source ] In 2011, Hall won Canada's Governor General's Award for English language poetry for his collection, Killdeer , a work the jury called "a masterly modulation of the elegiac through poetic time." [3] Killdeer also won the 2012 Trillium Book Award [4] and was also shortlisted for the 2012 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize. [5] Publications [ edit | edit source ] Giving Blood in Detroit . Vancouver: privately published, 1970. Eighteen Poems . Mexico City: Cyanamid, 1973. [6] The Crucifiction . Windsor, ON: Flat Singles Press, 1980. Homes: Poems . Windsor, ON: Black Moss, 1980. A Writer's Guide to Restaurants . Windsor, ON: Flat Singles Press, 1982. A Minor Operation . Toronto: blewointmentpress, 1983. Why I Haven't Written . London, ON: Brick Books, 1985. [6] Old Enemy Juice . Kingston, ON: Quarry Press, 1988. Unison-Light . Toronto: Flat Singles Press, 1986. Amanuensis . Coldstream, ON: Brick Books, 1989. The Unsaid . London, ON: Brick Books, 1992. Hearthedral: A folk-hermetic . London, ON: Brick Books, 1996. Trouble Sleeping . London, ON: Brick Books, 2000. An Oak Hunch . London, ON: Brick Books, 2005. White Porcupine . Toronto: BookThug, 2007. The Bad Sequence . Toronto: BookThug, 2007. Verulum . Maxville, ON: above/ground, 2009. Handwerk . Toronto: Beautiful Outlaw, 2009. The Little Seamstress . Toronto: Pedlar Press, 2010. Killdeer: Essay-poems . Toronto: BookThug, 2011. Shikibu Shuffle . Ottawa: above/ground, 2012. The Small Nouns Crying Forth . Toronto: BookThug, 2013. Conjugation . Toronto: BookThug, 2016. Guthrie Clothing: The poetry of Phil Hall; a selected collage (edited by Rob Maclennan). Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016. Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat . [7]