Kate Hall. The Certainty Dream. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2009. 80 pp. ISBN 978-I-55245-223-3. $16.95 (paper).
Kate Hall has an MFA in creative writing from Concordia University and has been teaching composition recently at McGill. She is in her early thirties, and The Certainty Dream is her first collection. The cover art, by David Trautrimas, is dominated by helicopter images made up surrealistically of oil cans, kitchen hand beaters, and other unrelated bits – dream images, really, and apt for Hall’s poems. Two silhouetted figures, a man and a woman, stand below on the roof of a brick building, and the woman waves at the choppers, easily acknowledging, as one would in a dream, the unlikely collaged machine-birds overhead. Much of Hall’s poetry is about this strange relationship between reality and dream, as well as about how language relates to reality. A line from “Vitrine” is significant here: “I was testing out a series of statements for truth-value.” That is perhaps the key to The Certainty Dream. Strange small objects in the world may be “exempt from doubt,” but everything human is debatable, tricky, and full of uncertainty.
There are recurrences in the poems – Hall’s father often crops up, and so too does the mynah bird, which the poet has called “a metaphor for making things new… they stand in for the poet, I am speaking through them.” But in general, this is work strongly influenced by language poetry (lang-po), so the connective tissue between lines and verses is frequently excised, and the sentences often seem largely to consist of bricks placed on top of one another with no grout to hold them together. The opening lines of “Little Essay on Genetics” provide a typical example:
It’s possible to love your mother
even though you’re genetically deficient
and she’s genetically deficient
and our deficiencies make a big hole
in the ground. Eventually each of us will have to decide
whether to get cremated or buried in a fancy casket.
Evolution is about the genes
manipulating the bodies they ride in.
Little girls wish for ponies
without realizing their parents
have already turned them into genetic horses.
We are encoded but we have not yet
completely broken ourselves.
This writing is not nearly as extreme as some lang-po, but clearly it is moving line to line in response to something other than normal logic or normal music. Poetry, of course, does not need to trade with anything “normal” when it comes to music and logic, though there are times in Hall’s work when it is hard to grasp what she is after. There are lines that stand out for being cogent or poignant – “Is it a real heart?/A real heart would stink/and rot and fall apart,” for example (there’s even rhyme here), or “The ducks are really tragic./They look at decoys and think/they’ve actually found someone else” – but at other times Hall’s lines remain mystifying and whole poems together can leave only an indistinct impression after one has read them.
Perhaps that is only to be expected in poems which reside so determinedly in dreams. In a poem called “Hands,” Hall uses a quote from G.E. Moore, the Cambridge philosopher, who in turn cites the Cartesian conundrum about not knowing whether we only dream that we are awake, i.e. that dream is the primary reality rather than waking life. Oneiric logic holds sway over Hall’s language in this book, and that is both its strength and its weakness, it seems to me. In “Literature Review,” a section of a longer sequence, Hall puts it in a nutshell:
The envelope of pills that you sent
arrived the same day as the shipment
of elephants and disembodied
voices. Skeptics do not believe
we can prove we are not dreaming,
but they are very grateful for the existence of
anti-psychotics. Exiled on a rock
in the middle of the ocean, this haunting
would cease to be a reality problem and
become a mere disturbance.
I don’t know how one ships elephants except in dream, much less disembodied voices, but the rest of this is clear, as it is equally clear that the poet is on the side of the skeptics. Nevertheless, unlike, say, the Symbolists, she does not derogate waking (or apparently waking) experience out of an anti-bourgeois dedication or a distaste for history, private or public. Psychological perturbations raise their hands occasionally, as in “Hands,” where she speaks of her private zodiac as containing the planets “isolation, guilt and humiliation,” but this sort of personal revelation is not on the whole characteristic of The Certainty Dream. “I’m not justified in my beliefs and I don’t really care” she says elsewhere.
Kate Hall has an interesting poetic intelligence. She’s smart and quirky, and though her language has barely a trace of romantic music, it does have a music of its own that is beguiling when it works well. It will be instructive to see where she goes from her first book, which has the cohesion and poise usually lacking in first books.
I’m going to climb inside
with all my crappy belongings and
breathe until I can’t breathe
anymore. But permit me to hold on
to my wickedness. Just that.
Bruce Whiteman’s The Invisible World Is in Decline Books I-VI was published in 2006. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is the head of UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.
