I am sitting outside at dawn on Otty Lake, where I live, in the woods. The light is coming over the trees, and each morning the poem is written as if right while it is being read. A rough immediacy. Gap & Hum. Caesura. Syllables as musical notes. The lyric weaving of honesty about the self—toward revelation & transformation. My poetics has widened, here, to include more space, more primitive sounds and glyphs, less metaphor, less anecdote, more tangential conjugating... My poetics, in its growing inclusiveness, is not sad but hopeful. The term "conjugation" refers to more than the obvious grammatical movement of pronouns through time (I am / you are / they will be). For, in Biology, it also refers to the transfer of information between cells. And Conjugation—the new collection of poetry from Governor General's Literary Award- and Trillium Book Award-winning poet Phil Hall—sees an open realm where individual letters inside a word are each rolling through their possibilities, from A to Z. Thereby, the language in this, Hall's eighteenth book of poetry, and the fourth to be published by BookThug, travels into and out of itself, as he says, "escaping my ego, while revealing, word by slightly different word, my deeper connections and disconnections to things—to what used to be called poetry's 'subjects.'" Replete with images of the natural world and in some cases, the mechanisms that transform it–horses, leaping fish, trees, canals and locks—Hall has created in Conjugation at once a return to the nature/nurture elements that have wound their way through his earlier collections, but also a versed ode to the discouragement that many Canadians have felt about the progression of their country and government over the past number of years. As much care was taken with the writing of this collection as the shaping of the poems themselves. Hall's poems are shaped into a form of free-verse terza rima (2-line / 1-line alternating pattern), where spaces between phrases and words allow the syntax to be infused with floods of words from other angles. This results in a quilting or cross-hatching or braiding effect that ensures that readers will be captured in the flow of Conjugation's wordplay and the evolution that takes place through its pages.

Increasingly known as the "poet's poet," Governor General's Award-winner Phil Hall has long been a constructor of intricate sequences, collecting and arranging lines and phrases, artifacts, and small revelations. He writes on influences, literary and local; he writes of rural Ontario, attempting to comprehend a deeply personal family violence; he stitches together lines and tall tales and fables from his life and the stories that float around the ethos of his variety of Ontario wilds. Hall's isn't a poetry carved into perfect diamond form but a poetry whittled from scores of found materials pulled apart and rearranged. This volume is not so much a "selected poems" as it is a reshuffle, a sampler from the span of Hall's published work. Guthrie Clothing is a collage-selection by Hall. Lines, stanzas, and poem-fragments are reworked and patterned into a new sequence, a fresh structure. The afterword consists of an important new essay-poem by Hall as well. It argues against irony from a rural perspective and amounts to Hall's ars poetica. In an encompassing introduction, rob mclennan explores Hall's four-plus decades of bricolage.

The first word in this new collection by Phil Hall is "raw" and the last word is "blurtip." Between these, many nouns cry faith within a hook-less framework that sings in chorus while undermining such standard forms & tropes as "the memoir," "genealogy" and "the shepherd's calendar." With a rural pen, these poems talk frogs, carrots, local noises, partial words, remnants, dirt roads, deep breath & hope: my laboratory the moment is accordion-shaped - cluttered - sopping & not eternal

WINNER OF THE 75th GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR POETRY WINNER OF THE 25th TRILLIUM BOOK PRIZE WINNER OF AN ALCUIN AWARD FOR DESIGN SHORTLISTED FOR THE GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE These are poems of critical thought that have been influenced by old fiddle tunes. These are essays that are not out to persuade so much as ruminate, invite, accrue. Hall is a surruralist (rural & surreal), and a terroir-ist (township-specific regionalist). He offers memories of, and homages to -- Margaret Laurence, Bronwen Wallace, Libby Scheier, and Daniel Jones, among others. He writes of the embarrassing process of becoming a poet, and of his push-pull relationship with the whole concept of home. His notorious 2004 chapbook essay The Bad Sequence is also included here, for a wider readership, at last. It has been revised. (It's teeth have been sharpened.) In this book, the line is the unit of composition; the reading is wide; the perspective personal: each take a give, and logic a drawback. Language is not a smart-aleck; it's a sacred tinkerer. Readers are invited to watch awe become a we. In Fred Wah's phrase, what is offered here is "the music at the heart of thinking."