Why I Haven't Written

Martin Singleton was a poet living in Toronto.

In “Mr. Kumamoto,” Hall writes of the elderly Japanese he is nursing: “I am not bowing my head / in prayer / before the nations’ sickness. // I am spreading ointment / on someone’s skin.” This lack of pretension, combined with a great deal of craft, makes this a very fine book. The diction is crisp and imaginative without being pyrotechnical: a pioneer is “thin as a scraped hide / window,” a minister’s mirth “small as a tea-cup.” Like Raymond Souster, Hall has a fine eye for detail, whether the tattoos and pinup calendars of an illiterate labourer or the snap of three-ring binders at a family picnic.

The book is divided into four sections. “The Irwin Picnic” explores family life from a perspective that is intensely subjective, yet accessible because of the universality of feelings evoked. Parent-child bonding, alienation, marriage arc treated cleanly yet with honesty. The poems of “Lamb’s School” (which is anything but) deal most realistically with the cruelty of schoolchildren. In “Being Paged” Hall writes with great sensitivity and warmth of the elderly he cared for. Finally, “A Kinder Calling” examines the causes and effects of Hall’s craft. “Reading Women” shows the poet to be that rarest of people, a liberated man. “Singing to Sleep,” which ends the collection, is a singularly brave and honest poem about the death of the protagonist’s father. This is poetry that is grounded in the real and transforms our view of it by craft and honesty. If you are going to buy one book of poetry this year, make it Why I Haven’t Written.