John Hall

Couldn't You? John Hall

Couldn't You? brings together most of John Hall's poems for the page written since the publication of Else Here in 1999 - and writing for the page here assumes black ink on white rectangular paper, but with the permissions that come with poems to engage that visual space of meaning with different tactics, ranging from the minimal and laconic forms of 'Gloss' and 'Harder than Ease' to the loquacious blocks of 'Here and There'. In each case the margins are part of the poems: the not writing of the margins confronting the writing with its omissions and limits, with its repetitive silences or obsessive utterances. What can poems - as poems - know? And is this the same as asking how many nos are bound up with a poem's knowing anything? As the poem says, avoidance and repetition.