Descartes asked, How can I know that I am not now dreaming? The Certainty Dream poses similar questions through poetry, but without the trappings of traditional philosophy. Kate Hall’s bracingly immediate, insistently idiosyncratic debut collection lays bare the tricks and tools of her trade: a mynah bird perches in poems but 'stands for nightingale'; the poet’s antelope turns transparent; she dresses up her orange trees with bark and leaves. As the dream world and the waking world blur, the body and the dimensions it inhabits become a series of overlapping circles, all acting as containers for both knowledge and uncertainty. At times disarmingly plainspoken, at others, singing with lyric possibility, these poems make huge associative leaps. Taken together, they present the argument that to truly 'know' something, one must first recognize its traces in something else.
Authors
- Control Number Identifier
- CaOOCEL
- Dewey Decimal Classification Number
- 811/.6
- Dewey Decimal Edition Number
- 22
- General Note
- Poems Issued as part of the desLibris books collection
- ISBN
- 9781770562561 9781552452233
- LCCN
- PR9199.4.H356238
- LCCN Item number
- C47 2009eb
- Modifying agency
- CaBNVSL
- Original cataloging agency
- DLC
- Physical Description | Extent
- 1 electronic text (79 p.)
- Published in
- Canada
- Publisher or Distributor Number
- CaOOCEL
- Rights
- Access restricted to authorized users and institutions
- System Control Number
- (CaBNVSL)slc00229716 (OCoLC)778435853 (CaOOCEL)443763
- System Details Note
- Mode of access: World Wide Web
- Transcribing agency
- DLC
Table of Contents
- In the gap between what one wants to say or what one perceives there is to say and what one can say what is sayable words provide for a collaboration and desertion. 14
- Quiet 18
- Im going to give you a knee better than the one God gave you. 21
- How am I to prove now that Heres one hand and heres another I do not believe I can do it. I should have to prove for one thing as Descartes pointed out that I am not now dreaming. 23
- Soft Bathtub Model Ghost Version 1966 26
- Clothespin 1976 27
- Bicyclette Ensevelie Buried Bicycle 1990 28
- The forest would be a quiet place if only the bird with the prettiest voice sang. 31
- What I thought I had seen with my eyes I actually grasped solely with the faculty of judgment which is my mind. 36
- Speculate as to why Crossing the Bar has been criticized for a falling off in the last stanza. 39
- If God does not exist one will lose nothing by believing in him while if he does exist one will lose everything by not believing. 51
- Your Grace Captain Father tourist 53
- Do not give the foxes names lest you turn them into porcelain figures. 56
- Im dying 61
- What happened to the ships 64
- Colorado Review jubilat Swerve Denver Quarterly Open City LIT Boston Review 80
