Never Cry Woof

Shafer Hall
No Tell Books

If a poet’s voice is his artistic fingerprint, as Auden suggested, Shafer Hall’s prints would have ridges the size of the Rockies. Hall has an unmistakable twang, a sort of sensitive gruffness. If you’ve never heard him read in person, imagine Sam Elliott in his part as the Stranger in The Big Lebowski, or as Virgil Earp in Tombstone. That might be suitable approximation.

It seems many younger poets are building their collections around voice. Shanna Compton, Jennifer L. Knox, Brent Cunningham, Eugene Ostashevsky, Carson Cistulli. The question with Hall seems to be is voice enough? The poems’ engines don’t run on the usual fuels of contemporary poetry—rhetorical structure, formal innovation, lyric daring, or fragmented narrative—instead, there is this voice. This charming, irresistible, witty, completely assured voice. More succinctly, “[H]is swagger was a swagger / of the soul and not the body” as Hall says himself in “Near Magical Skills.”

The book opens with “How to Survive on Land & Sea,” “Evening came / with no nickels for dancing.” Hall is deliberate. The poem acts as an introduction to a slightly different reality that is soaked in rye whiskey and wit.

Earlier in the day,

a public opinion poll

of two Mexican kids indicated:

one hundred percent

of two Mexican kids

prefer orange Popsicles

to their big brother’s girl.

and later

See for yourself:

in the nickel light

a slender woman dances

and mispronounces your name.

Of course, if you’re going to have such a well-defined perspective, you’re going to need things to talk about.

Hall exposes us to his characters’ worldviews through what they claim as their own— “Nick Burnette’s America,” “Brian Orsak’s Tuxedo,” “Frances’ Fine Lines,” and “Avery’s Possums.” In “Nick Burnette’s America,” Burnette provides

incisive commentary

(suburban decay,

middle-age paranoia)

by throwing a brick through

my uncle’s rotted back fence.

Many of Hall’s poems provide these telling vignettes, not much more than a character sketch or one emphasized detail even, but the reader comes away with an experience of that subject, a glimpse into another life.

There’s also Cathy, who knows what kind of kisser rock ‘n’ roll can be, and Patricia, who is mostly “made of water / in the form of lakes / and melted glaciers,” and the word play of “The Evolution of Miriam Barbary”:

You’re Barbary to me.

Be my barbary.

Barbary is the end and the beginningbary.

You name is a call to Barbary.

Barbary as catch can.

Hall knows how to turn a phrase and make a friend out of sound.

Elegance standing

in walls of teeth

incisors – a sunrise.

(“Dental Gold”)

a brittle siege

a turning of leaves

the no-sound of varnish hardening on pine

(“Nannies Love Their Own Children Too”)

When I lay on the grass in the park,

I shall break no blades.

(“Every Three Hundred Nights”)

Hall’s poems should be read slowly. They are usually only two or three sentences and the pacing and splay of the syntax across line breaks becomes all the more important. The poem “Terror.” can be read as a kind of Ars Poetica for Hall, or at least instructions on how to read his work:

Count the Ts on your tounge:

Forget. Tuxedo. Azteca.

Now knit several Ss into

a blanket for your mouth:

Estoy. Some sort of providence.

Give yourself some room,now,

with silent sounds:

Knot. Knowingly.

Now pronounce the commas

As, you, try, to, get, away.

Something should also be said about the Amanda Burnham’s illustrations that accompany the poems. Burnham’s surreal blends of bodies and wilderness, urban scenes and desolate landscapes are a nice compliment to Hall’s poems. None of the illustrations are titled, as far as I can tell, but if I were charged with naming them, I might call some of them as follows: “Hands and Arms and Hands and Arms and Hands and Arms,” “No Roof Over My Head,” “Dr. Seuss’s Desk on Acid,” “Cats & Timber,” and my favorite, the last illustration in the book, “Don Giovanni Lectures on Noah’s Ark and the Oceans of Hair.”

Hall is a companion on the long trails, a generous bartender, a joking linguist, a wise cowboy, a charming Southern gentleman, a surrealist with two feet on the ground, a keen observer with plentiful imagination. As he writes in “A Malfunction at the Junction,” with Never Cry Woof, Shafer Hall has “loosed into the world / a tremendous wink.”

- Dan Brady