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 to be pulled apart and rearranged. This volume is not so much a selected poems as it is a re-shuffle, a sampler, from the span of Hall s published work. "Guthrie Clothing:
The Poetry of Phil Hall, a Selected Collage" is a collage-selection by the author of previously published lines, stanzas, and poem-fragments reworked and pared down, patterned together into a
new structure. An important new essay-poem by Hall appears at the end. In an encompassing introduction, rob mclennan explores Hall s four-plus decades of bricolage. "
