Trouble Sleeping by Phil Hall

Trouble Sleeping by Phil Hall

"If only my cousin had kept off me, kept out of me his brown fly-strop glue, his shot dog-eye cream. Afterwards, he would comb my hair to a wet Elvis point between my eyes and warn me what his wolves would do to me, and where I'd be sent, if I ever told."

This experience is at the core of Phil Hall's Trouble Sleeping. It is the source of bad dreams and also, paradoxically, the source of his crisp, luminous text. Trouble Sleeping makes visible the poetry of hopeful despair by remembering a poor working class family of Irish descent, living outside the margins of respectability at the edge of the Laurentian Shield in mid-Northern Ontario in the 1950s. This raw world is seen by a child who is a misfit in it (especially among its brutal, drunken males). That child will eventually come to speak for the plight of unregarded misfits in society at large. "Orthodontics is a class issue" to the writer looking back on a time when it never occurred to his parents that crooked teeth might be fixed--not that they could have afforded it. In Trouble Sleeping, working a variation on the Japanese form of haibun, Hall alternates prose passages with poems that reflect nightmarishly on the interwoven narratives.

In 1973, Cyanamid, a Canadian mining firm, published Phil Hall's first tiny book, Eighteen Poems, in Mexico City. Old Enemy Juice (1988), The Unsaid (1992), and Hearthedral 1/2 A Folk-Hermetic (1996) are only a few of his many works. Phil was a member of the Vancouver Industrial Writers' Union and the Vancouver Men Against Rape Collective in the early 1980s. He's lectured on writing at York University, Ryerson University, Seneca College, George Brown College, and other institutions. He's worked as a poet-in-residence at Sage Hill Writing Experience in Saskatchewan, The Pierre Berton House in Dawson City, Yukon, and other places.

Phil's long poem White Porcupine was published by BookThug in 2007. He and his wife, Ann, also walked the Camino de Santiago de Compostela in 2007. He lives near Perth, Ontario, and is a member of the Writers' Union of Canada. An Oak Hunch and The Little Seamstress are two of his most recent works.

The Little Nouns Crying Faith (2013) is his most recent novel. Killdeer was described by the Governor General's Prize jury as a masterful modulation of the elegiac through poetic time.