An Oak Hunch

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

Phil Hall’s An Oak Hunch, shortlisted for the 2006 Griffin Poetry
Prize, makes some stringent demands on its readers, but it also repays
the careful reading its five sequences insist upon. These short long
poems all enter the realm of collaboration, with each other, with
various figures alluded to, with specific texts named, as well as many
not mentioned. On one level he has created a hall of echoes rather than
mirrors, a “Hall” at both his self and the lifetime of reading he
calls on as he writes.

“The Interview” appears to be a reminiscence of a picnic in the
1920s or ’30s, just after a friend of the speaker was shot—in a
context never told. “An Oak Hunch: Essay on Purdy” plays off, I
believe, scattered lines of Purdy poems, both arguing with and honouring
the poet’s stance: “from the long feud he mediated / between am & I
// (am’s lemon-light / I’s gull-beseech) // come anonymity’s rusty
old blunderbuss / this ornate we.”

“Mucked Rushes” plays a game of I, while veering into various dark
corners of the mind, but everywhere it warns against taking that ploy at
face value: “defect-imperial—it—I—was feeding // what won’t
be—& on / what won’t be.” “Gank Pluck” seems even more
determined to pretend to lyric autobiography; a number of illusive and
allusive stories here seem to play off bits of the author’s biography.
In both sequences, however, the language and the formal ploys deny any
easy assumptions about the putative speakers. These poems are more
interested in questioning generic assumptions than in providing easy
answers. Even the final section, “Index of First Lines,” which does
play off, in a kind of commentary, first lines of Hall’s earlier
poems, uses those lines to interrogate the speaker’s past and present
attitudes and behaviour. Nothing is easy, nor will Hall have it so.

An Oak Hunch fully lives up to Hall’s insistence that poetry be
quick, alive to all possibilities, and deliberately uneasy. It’s a
strong addition to his oeuvre.