The Mother on the Other Side of the World

This new collection displays an intimate authority and mystery of tone that are the fulfillment of a genuine gift and uncompromising devotion to it. -- W.S. MerwinIn his fifth book of poems, The Mother on the Other Side of the World, James Baker Hall revisits his dark childhood and his mother's suicide with a perspective earned by a lifetime of courageous spiritual and artistic work. Hall's poetic technique refracts experience to reveal the energies -- secular, spiritual, animal, and human -- that transcend forms.In addition to being an accomplished poet, Hall is an award-winning photographer whose images are as sophisticated as they are unusual. Like his photographs, described as enormous with implication, Hall's poems repay close scrutiny but do not reveal themselves easily. In a language of layers, Hall renders ceremonies of country life, replete with foxes, stones, fences, and that dependable icon of childhood, the yellow school bus. With talismanic natural imagery, he refigures the mother's body as a mythic landscape. What these poems know -- without explanation -- is a grace beyond both intuition and belief.