Wake up Hall! Therell be plenty of time
After this lesson for your poetry stuff.
Sniggerings from the back. An urgent rhyme
Jumps on my mind and drives old Euclid off.
Those are the opening lines from one of J. C. Halls later poems Curriculum Vitae recalling his boyhood stirrings as a poet. His first published outing could hardly have been more auspicious it was in a volume he shared with Keith Douglas and Norman Nicholson. Those two poets have long been on the Faber list: after all these years it a pleasure to welcome J. C. Hall to the fold.
Long Shadows: Poems 1938-2002 in the authors words is not a collected poems in the sense of containing everything Ive written and published but a comprehensive selection of poems which seem in their various ways worth preserving. Dont be misled by his characteristic modesty these poems are very much worth preserving.
When reviewing the first edition of this volume Vernon Scannell referred to J. C. Halls considerable gifts going on to say it is interesting to watch the development of a talent that has always been rooted firmly in the great tradition of English lyrical poetry in a tone . . . rather like that of a more genial Philip Larkin . . .
In a nice apothegm W. H. Auden once observed formal verse frees one from the fetters of ones ego and in the poems of J. C. Hall we see a craftsmanship that yields to the reader constant pleasure and enjoyment. J. C. Hall should be better known.
Some of them are so very moving. I love the last lines of Juliot - just the sort of thing I should like to have done myself. Philip Larkin (in a letter to the author)
Hall writes movingly and often wittily about childhood love and loss. These poems are the real thing. Vernon Scannell Sunday Telegraph
Everything in Long Shadows has the mark of a distinct individual talent. These poems are finely-calculated technically adept and sometimes they can prove moving in a sudden unexpected way. Alan Brownjohn London Magazine
The result is real poems - moving elegies spirited epiphanies wryly humorous observations. I read this book with growing admiration and then - with enormous pleasure - I immediately read it again. Matt Simpson Stride
"J. C. Hall" was born in London in 1920. He grew up in Tunbridge Wells, literally on the Kent and Sussex border. After living and working in London for many years he returned to Tunbridge Wells on retirement. He has eidited the Collected Poems of Edwin Muir and Keith Douglas and is Douglas's Literary executor.
