Eccolo: Poems by Hal Coase PRE-ORDER
Published 31st July 2025. Available for pre-order.
'Eccolo' considers what it means to exist in the pause, between history and the present, home and afar. I begin with the minimal parts of language - letters and phonemes - and then work to build outwards towards a tapestry that can take in a landscape and its history. In the first sequence, 'Animal Alphabets', I try to imagine language as a creaturely thing: considering its rhythms, customs, and habitats in parallel with the natural world, while resting skeptical about our capacity to access nature without mediation. I use a miniature form of rhyming quatrains that compresses colloquialisms, quotations, and aphorisms, in order to reflect on the gap that separates human and animal expression. In the subsequent sequence of lyric poems, I think about how significance is thrown up within the pause between two moments: a door held ajar; a homecoming; a butchered canvas. Human connection is figured here as a skin "tender, changing, insubstantial "that stretches over past pain and future uncertainties. The collection's final sequence, 'Ochre Pitch', recounts a road trip through the centre of Sardinia, on the hunt for ancient ruins. It brings together themes of heritage, history, and estrangement with observations of the natural world.
'Eccolo' considers what it means to exist in the pause, between history and the present, home and afar. I begin with the minimal parts of language - letters and phonemes - and then work to build outwards towards a tapestry that can take in a landscape and its history. In the first sequence, 'Animal Alphabets', I try to imagine language as a creaturely thing: considering its rhythms, customs, and habitats in parallel with the natural world, while resting skeptical about our capacity to access nature without mediation. I use a miniature form of rhyming quatrains that compresses colloquialisms, quotations, and aphorisms, in order to reflect on the gap that separates human and animal expression. In the subsequent sequence of lyric poems, I think about how significance is thrown up within the pause between two moments: a door held ajar; a homecoming; a butchered canvas. Human connection is figured here as a skin "tender, changing, insubstantial "that stretches over past pain and future uncertainties. The collection's final sequence, 'Ochre Pitch', recounts a road trip through the centre of Sardinia, on the hunt for ancient ruins. It brings together themes of heritage, history, and estrangement with observations of the natural world.
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