This Understated Land

Collected Poems

1981–2019

I have a New England mind. I have mixed my peculiar compost into the tilled soil when it is barely warm, and scattered my poetic lettuce seed into it, throwing the newest rocks with admiration over the fence and under the stone wall. I’ve mixed the dregs of last years leaves and added eggshells and Emerson to the clay, and watered it with my children and my chickadees while I watched the lettuce sprout. I have grown my own earthworms. I expect frost to come again and again. Add a trickle of melancholia at the beginning and a soak of Lou Gehrig’s Disease at the end and you will get my life. I have transplanted the tender lettuce leaves with their myriad shades of green and blue and purple into straighter rows. I’ve cultivated the best and served them up, but so many more went to seed and became ungainly and bitter. I hope the ones I picked will nourish someone, sometime. (from the Preface)

For any poet, especially one facing the inevitabilities of ALS, little can be as daunting as compiling one’s collected poems which sit unvarnished on the page against the harsh light of time—a reminder how small we all are in this vast universe. And yet poet Sid Hall faces this squarely with head up and makes it come together in This Understated Land. His training as a classical scholar and his lifetime of dedication to and about the published word are evident everywhere in this book. Take this excerpt from “Pleiades”:

It takes the night
and an ocean
to make the Pleiades feel at home.

It takes a man
with an empty heart free to love . . . .

Hall shies from nothing in this almost 400-page collection. One stumbles across a small, humorous couplet only to discover, following, the soul-searching angst of the Iraq War in his long poem, “The Great North Woods” which ends:

Consciousness, imagination:
two sides of a coin that someday soon
could land with a different side glinting
in the sunlight, could come down
in the deep grass, in the hidden muck,
heads up.

—Jacket Notes by Rodger Martin

400 pp. Hardcover | ISBN 978-1-939449-09-2 | Price $30.00 | Free Shipping | 15% to ALS Association