Poems
2008
Fumbling in the Light
There are many kinds of darkness,
and many kinds of death,
but poetry is not one of them.
It is difficult to get the news from poems,
said Williams.
There are many ways of
fumbling in the dark
and dying.
Someone is thinking of another way
this very moment.
The poetry of earth is never dead,
said Keats.
It is the only way we have of
fumbling in the light.
“Sidney Hall achieves a kind of sophisticated simplicity that is rare among his contemporaries. Call him a neoclassicist seasoned by the spirits of Zen and Taoism—his poems are revelations, beautiful and true.”
—Sam Hamill
“Sidney Hall patrols his territory—harsh and beautiful coasts, wild mountain places—with a restless energy, a keen eye and an almost unbearable need to reconcile what he loves of our fragile world with what he fears for it and for us. The poems are shot through with anger and sadness. Yet for all their dark urgency, they are illuminated with slant beams of hope as If to surprise each new visitor / who comes to the end of the world. Take these poems and let them pay out like kites on long strings; then reel them in, one by one.”
—Marie Harris, Former New Hampshire Poet Laureate
“These poems reflect a constant striving toward the creation of something gem-like, stanza by stanza, even as the author holds in his hands the earthiest of elements. What delights even more than these word pleasures, however, is the author’s joining of his highly exact style and rich imagery to a quiet but fiercely powerful moral vision and an almost oceanic humanity. This felicitous four-way marriage occurs in poem after poem, whether the subject be dark or light. Sidney Hall’s enlightened constellation of artistic concerns surely distinguishes the best poetry of this or any era.”
—Lawrence Kinsman, author of Water from the Moon and A Well-Ordered Life
112 pp, Hardcover | ISBN 978-0-9801672-2-1 | Price $21.95 | Free Shipping | 15% to ALS Association
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