Field Music

Starred review from August 17, 2020
Hall’s striking debut, winner of the 2019 National Poetry Series, describes life in rural Vermont, full of sneaky cowbirds, diesel fumes, fecal runoff, lilacs, musty lake houses where “things don’t unrot,” and voices with particular twangs: “Mom says ancient/ like ank-shint” and “Dad says he can sing like a Kawasaki. He says/ he’s got some good idears.” Violence and danger lurk throughout, and borders are transgressed by unruly plants and people: “The morning// glories creep up the shafts of the garden/ vegetables, their seductive curls choking/ out my small plot.” Between awkward sexual initiations and adult encounters, rhyme brings a sense of order: “A desire that looks good on me,/ that hugs the detailed curves of fantasy,/ instead of this mess, this heaving blur./ Could this be pleasure?” In the collection’s closing poem, Hall movingly advises: “what stays are the song and the crash/ of the tractor, the trash compactor, the machines/ full of love and the fields full of breaking/ the fields where the light slips out.” This atmospheric collection will transport readers to Hall’s layered landscapes.

August 1, 2020

Hall opens her National Poetry series-winning debut by evoking "meadows inflamed and gone blonde/ with rash goldenrod" but immediately veers away from pretty-picture making: "I want/ to love something. Not to open my mouth/ like the long, smooth flower/ of a ravenous weed." While depicting hardscrabble life in rural Vermont ("Winter pushes my father and his home and his froze-up pipes"), she reveals her own brash, bright personality and hunger for life. Face to face with a C�zanne, she picks up the challenge and makes the painting her own--"So/ I stood there all night trying to meet that messy landscape's glance, / massaging its junk, snapping its bra, growling lowly in its ear, / baring my teeth"--and throughout we see her grow, from her first sexual experience ("I didn't want romantic/ I wanted him to suck my lips off my face") to marriage ("the bear trap that had once gripped// my ankle") and children ("My baby// was as heavy as a headstone"). All the while continuing to deliver the special music of her surroundings. VERDICT A gracious and embraceable work for a wide range of readers.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2020
This debut collection forcefully introduces Hall as an arrived rather than an emerging poet. Listening is essential to how Hall records dialects and translates ideas, how she converts a world of sounds into song. The title poem presents life in rural Vermont with precision and raw truth. Life can be harsh, dirty, even violent. Hall's experiments with phrasing, tone, and rhythm, along with visual and auditory dissonance, make the poem feel like an avant-garde orchestral piece. The potent last line jars readers awake: If you keep kicking somebody, music / will come out eventually. This collection is full of such quotable lines and is held cohesively together by repeated concepts: the idea of falling, hearing and not hearing, what overlays the world, and sensations of being in or leaving the body ( You have to be able to leave yourself before you can truly leave another ). Field Music is a mature collection by a young poet who sees through the veils we use to cover what's ugly and disturbing. Hall wants readers to be uncomfortable, in the very best sense.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)