Daniel Hall is the author of three books of poetry, Hermit with Landscape (1990), selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Strange Relation (1995), chosen for the National Poetry Series in 1996, and Under Sleep (2007). Hall is the recipient of a Whiting Award in Poetry, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, among other honors. He has also been an Amy Lowell Traveling Scholar, and is currently Writer-in-Residence at Amherst College, where he also serves on the editorial board of The Common.
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Strange RelationPoemsFrom"Son"
He sent this key from Florida.
I think. A key to what?
I tried the car, the trucks,
tried every door – nothing fit.
My wife thought it was his idea
of a joke. I never got his jokes.
Not a word from him, just things:
a blank postcard from Colorado Springs;
a snapshot of himself from Aspen,
arm in arm with somebody, but
both faces had been scissored out.
A sign above the bar said SHIT HAPPENS.
Eugene, Spokane… He’s telephone,
collect, and I knew it was him,
though he always used a different name.
At times enough to make you laugh:
Call from Hans, Ricardo, Jeff,
will you accept? Yes. Dial tone.
Strange Relation:Poems -
Strange RelationPoemsFrom"Coca-Cola"
What I want is a single uncrumpled can,
still factory-bright, held lightly aloft,
in the roadside stubble. I want to see the clouds
warp achingly across it, and to hear
the one high hawk’s cry drawn out to a wisp,
a flourish perfected over time, that might answer
the crisply branded Circle-R, white on red.
Want it to end with a perceptible shudder
in the wake of an Airstream or an eighteen-wheeler,
the aftermath of something really big.
Strange Relation:Poems -
Strange RelationPoemsFrom"Pneuma: 1967"
Standing on the lake, I felt my heart
growing heavier, growing old.
He clopped his gloves together,
shot me a look so warm it hurt.
Hell, it’s cold! he laughed. And colder
tomorrow. Shifting to the other
foot, he shivered an emphatic God
- and set revolving into space
another shapeless cloud
of crystals, impalpable, separate…
Breathless tonight I caught it
full in the face.
Strange Relation:Poems
“Daniel Hall’s poetry also negotiates autobiography and desire, and much of his new collection, Under Sleep, pairs an impulse to elegy (it is dedicated to his late partner) with a love of perceptual activity, that impressionistic seeing and feeling that comes from the conflicting currents of mind and body and is the backbone of so much lyric poetry.” —Chicago Tribune
“Daniel Hall’s work reminds us that a poet’s sharp-sightedness, the whole business of ‘getting things right,’ is a matter of far more than accuracy. It’s a matter of—inescapably—thanksgiving.” —Brad Leithauser, New York Review of Books [on Strange Relation]
"Daniel Hall is a patient craftsman, a weigher of each word. Smaller and more lucid than their model, his imitations of life place no burden upon us; rather, their deftness lightens our step. Here mind once again outdances the monumental.” —James Merrill, 1989 Yale Series of Younger Poets judge [on Hermit with Landscape]
Selected Works
