The Mother on the Other Side of the World: Poems - Softcover

Hall, James Baker

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1889330310 ISBN 13: 9781889330310

Publisher: Sarabande Books, 1999

Synopsis

In his fifth book of poems, The Mother on the Other Side of the World, James Baker Hall revisits his dark childhood with a spiritual maturity earned of lifelong struggle with the forces of silence, secrecy, deception, and hiding. Without the usual linear guideposts and cathartic emotional epiphanies we've come to expect from contemporary poetry, he reveals the dangerous and strange aspects of family intimacies that are both universal and taboo. With talismanic images from the natural world, he refigures the mother's body as a timeless landscape, through which these visceral and worldly poems move. And move they surely do, with a distinctive panache, with great kinesthetic intensity and subtlety. A pilgrimage is implicit in the stops they make and in the sacraments they achieve. An experienced conjurer dealing with his deepest urgencies, Hall realizes a poetic technique in these poems that refracts embodied experience to reveal the energies-secular, spiritual, animal, and human-that come and go in forms. What these poems know-without explanation-is a grace beyond both intuition and belief.

The Mother on the Other Side of the World is James Baker Hall's fifth book of poems. The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, and The Kenyon Review are among the many magazines to have published his work. He has received an NEA fellowship in poetry writing and has won both Pushcart and O. Henry prizes. He lives with his wife, fiction writer Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, in the Kentucky countryside and teaches at the University of Kentucky.

"James Baker Hall has consistently pursued in his poetry a trajectory that is deeply authentic. It has produced writing of daring and delicacy, over a period long enough to make it plain that this is not a momentary brilliance but a sustained vision. He has been dedicated to making the language reflect the surprise, the turns and leaps of memory and recurrent apparition in which pain and beauty are often indistinguishable. This new collection displays an intimate authority and mystery of tone that are the fulfillment of a genuine gift and uncompromising devotion to it."-W.S. Merwin

"A delightful collection of poems depicting Hall's life long st

About this title

About the Author

The Mother on the Other Side of the World is James Baker Hall's fifth book of poems. The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, and The Kenyon Review are among the many magazines to have published his work. He has received an NEA fellowship in poetry writing and has won both Pushcart and O. Henry prizes. He lives with his wife, fiction writer Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, in the Kentucky countryside and teaches at the University of Kentucky.

Reviews

There is only one instance of punctuation to be found in Hall's fifth collection; the resultant enjambments and phrasal torquingsAparticularly as they often serve a particularly insistent male desireAcan suggest William Carlos Williams, but more often bring to mind e.e. cummings: "a glimpse of white T-shirt/ and then the whole a bed a rug/ a table an unlit lamp chairs/ two windows billowing white/ shadows moving the moonlight now." Although Hall's eschewing of verbal bric-a-brac and the end-of-poem emotional catharsis seems similar to the verse associated with the New American Poetry, an unreformed self-psychology is betrayed by such prosaic saws as "I bend forward already knee-deep/ in the pond watching my hand change/ underwater at eye level" or "I see the child I was/ with all his skin/ clothed his back turned always." The book is divided into five sections of seven to nine poems each. The fourth contains the more risky confessions (sex with mother's fox fur; intimations of sexual abuse). The last attempts to widen the book's scope with a poem titled "Mogadishu": "what had once been her face/ was now all eyes open the child/ lay on a roadside pallet watching/ the dusty direction from which help would come...." One poem later, "God's Overture" ends "I ejaculated for the first time/ Fall 1948 Glendale California/ no idea what was happening/ ...making noises promising God anything/ for the chance to start over from scratch." Readers won't be as sorely tempted. (Aug.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In his fifth collection, Hall conjures up a poetic world of apparitions, dark memories, and haunting encounters with Otherness. The dead, the living, the remembered, and the long-forgotten all inhabit the same poetic space. Slaughtered buffalo are "freed/ into the real world mistaken/ for snapping twigs or distant/ thunder or history at night." Encounters with deer, owls, horses, and stray cats are valuable because of their "farawayness." Hall tenderly buries a cat whose head was grotesquely wedged in a dog food can, musing that the feline experienced "heaviness/ turning into its shadow." Hall composes in short, staccato lines that mimic the flow of thought and breath; one is caught up in the effect. He is invariably graphic. Sunset has "claws of reddish light," and a hillside spills into a pasture "like light poured/ from a pitcher." In "Ars Poetica" he suggests an aesthetic of the ephemeral: a fox runs into headlights carrying his tail "like a pen running out of ink" before disappearing. Recommended for all larger collections.ADaniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, IL
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"Her Fingertips" From The Mother on the Other Side of the World by James Baker Hall

all those years

she could have been any age

not born trying to die her

hands would rise up around my face

as though they were my own

and only she knew what they were doing

tracing my veins drawing my blood

to the surface I knew only

that they were hands

and we loved many

of the same things

one cup in particular

fingers laced

palmlessly

the light

dividing

over her

body her body

enlightened with this

the part I love best

and this if I said more

she would shush me

Edition details

• Publisher: Sarabande Books
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1889330310
• ISBN 13: 9781889330310
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 72