Guthrie Clothing: The Poetry of Phil Hall, a Selected Collage

Increasingly known as the poets poet, Governor Generals Awardwinner Phil Hall has long been a constructor of intricate sequences, collecting and arranging lines and phrases, artifacts, and small revelations.

He writes on influences, literary and local; he writes of rural Ontario, attempting to comprehend a deeply personal family violence; he stitches together lines and tall tales and fables from his life and the stories that float around the ethos of his variety of Ontario wilds.

Halls isnt a poetry carved into perfect diamond form but a poetry whittled from scores of found materials pulled apart and rearranged.

This volume is not so much a selected poems as it is a reshuffle, a sampler from the span of Halls published work.

Guthrie Clothing is a collage-selection by Hall. Lines, stanzas, and poem-fragments are reworked and patterned into a new sequence, a fresh structure.

The afterword consists of an important new essay-poem by Hall as well.

It argues against irony from a rural perspective and amounts to Halls ars poetica.

In an encompassing introduction, rob mclennan explores Halls four-plus decades of bricolage.