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
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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.
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.
"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
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