Killdeer | CBC Books - Action News
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Killdeer

Phil Hall's collection of poetry won the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry in 2011, and was a finalist for the 2012 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Phil Hall

Killdeeris a bracingly original collection of autobiographical "essay-poems" in which author Phil Hall ponders his formation as a poet, looking critically (and with wry humour) at his writing process and paying tribute to writers in his "literary family." In his meditation on the killdeer as his "totem bird" (it fakes injury to lure predators away from its nest, which he compares to being emotionally manipulative in poems), Hall criticizes poetic forms that "dummy-down/the complexity of impression/expression"; that charge could never be levelled at his work.

Killdeerwon the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry in 2011, and was also a finalist for the 2012 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Read an excerpt | Author interviews

From the book

Some trust imagination in the round

I love a wild fountain's clear gush in a gully in a squall

secreted within its headlands my caress

if this tiny despair-basket I lead with were real

it would be of woven willow

going is what I trust/in a way


From Killdeer by Phil Hall 2011. Published by BookThug.

Author interviews