Shafer Hall. Never Cry Woof. No Tell Books, 2007.

Review by Nathan Bartel

They all have it right, those who speak to Shafer Hall’s poems on the back cover (& other, various (online) places) of his debut collection, Never Cry Woof. They cite Hieronymous Bosch, rubber chickens, boxers, cocoa nibs, Santa Fe, boxers, uncles, bars (& their tending), cities (& their inhabitants). They have it right; it is an absurd (& absurdly funny) sort of sinner-scape we’re invited into here. “I found myself bored this morning / on the Marcy Avenue platform,” begins “A Malfunction at the Junction,”

and, thinking of my old friend Grehlls,

I got angry at the wastebasket there,

called it “Mister!”

and repeatedly asked it

what it was looking at.

These are the sorts of encounters the reader can expect throughout this collection. They are weird, & perhaps a little unnerving, & unnerved, a little threatening (threatening for whom changes from poem to poem), & fucking funny. So we might go on reading, content watching the various characters in these poems swagger, stumble, sit & stand & spin in & through what must be New York City, but a particular New York City: Mr. Hall’s (though the city could surely never be only one person’s, could never be a tabula rasa). To wit:

With the strength of one thousand turkeys

on a pre-colonial Manhattan Island,

I’ll flex my tongues and arms.

When I walk in this city I can imagine no buildings. (“Indian Style”)

That is probably more than enough. We know Mr. Hall can back this last claim; he can imagine just about anything. Just pages earlier Mr. Hall has what is, to this reader’s mind, the final word (literally & figuratively) on the greatest of American institutions: “to be satisfied: / summer vacation is / the end of the world” (“Memorial Day”). We could celebrate the discovery of such powerful, intoxicating individual vision made manifest on the page, & leave it at that.

But there’s more to do. If we return to “A Malfunction at the Junction,” we see not only the aforementioned absurdity & frustration, but also deeply felt affinity. Whoever “Grehlls” is, he is loved, loved enough to be evoked in moments of profound, city-bound loneliness (lonely enough to berate a trashcan). Over & over friends & loved ones get named, particularly in the titles of these poems: “Nick Burnette’s America,” “Evelyn’s Kitchen,” “Brian Orsak’s Tuxedo,” & “Frances’s Fine Lines,” goes one unbroken string of doozies. These poems find their impetus not just in love but in those who are loved. It’s not hard to make the connection here to other New York City poets (O’Hara, of course, springs to mind), but I think Mr. Hall also has kindred spirits in T’ao Ch’ien, Li Po & Tu Fu, who assuaged the extended periods of seclusion central to the lives of learned government officials by drinking a little wine & thinking of their friends (I’m thinking particularly of Li Po’s “Seeing a Friend Off,” Tu Fu’s “Dreaming of Li Po” & T’ao Ch’ien’s “Drinking Wine, No. 3”). Mr. Hall probably doesn’t work for the government, but his poems emerge at a strikingly similar wistful distance from those he loves; “Last night, we went prowling down Second Avenue,” begins “The Evening Wore Blue,”

and I wore my favorite shirt

hoping with aim but without conviction

that Anna would be back from L.A.

and once again patrolling the Lower East Side.

Compare that to Tu Fu, from “Dreaming of Li Po”:

…my old friend has entered my dreams,

proof of how long I’ve pined for him.

He didn’t look the way he used to,

the road so far—farther than I can guess.

& while Mr. Hall’s poems were composed roughly 1500 years after Tu Fu’s, they seem strikingly similar, by which I mean not so much “similar” as “sympathetic” – longing, it seems, has not gone out of style.

We might draw parallels with other poets, other books. Like Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Never Cry Woof is illustrated (wonderfully, by Amanda Burnham; I hesitate to describe her work…you should see for yourself: www.amandaburnham.com; or just buy the book, for goshsakes…); also like Blake in his Songs, Mr. Hall’s poetic (& often his poems) fall somewhere between “innocence” & “experience”; the lessons here are learned even as they are imparted. Mr. Hall’s work sometimes strays a little too far away from the experiential & into the experienced; occasionally, the last lines of these poems feel like a payoff, a punch line known far in advance of the joke’s telling. Mr. Hall is at his best when he avoids the familiar comfort of the last laugh & lets the (often hilarious, sometimes resigned) moment linger, as at the close of “Pink Snow”:

I am sure of my hand;

it will occasionally slip.

Warm ground soaks right up,

but snow remembers awhile.

Speaking of innocence & experience: it is at these times in Never Cry Woof when Mr. Hall reminds me of another poet (last one, I swear): Richard Brautigan. Like Brautigan, Hall’s work inhabits the space of “just then,” the place where the thing is happening now. & while Brautigan’s childlike awe & wonder is replaced with a wink in Hall’s work, both poets imbue their poems with that sense of being right there. I have mentioned Mr. Hall’s “individual vision” & compared his work to Blake, so it might sound as though I make him out to be a prophetic poet. He’s not – or at least, he’s not prophetic in this book. Instead, these poems are immediately present; they’re here.

And it is at this point where Mr. Hall departs the company of Brautigan, Tu Fu & the rest, because it seems that, while he longs as those others long, he is unsure what he longs for – solitude or friendship? Here or there? It is this uncertain, restless state, tempered by sharp intelligence & a buoyant wit, that sets Never Cry Woof apart – or in the middle of it all. Regardless, we find ourselves in between, neither exiled nor at home, neither innocent nor experienced, present but distracted, with buddies, occupied, alone. “The harbor lights dimmed,” concludes the final poem in this collection,

and for a moment, the sea

was another body, the shore

was another land, and the boats

on the water were other animals.

To own a boat must be a pleasure. (“Nautical Selection”)

A pleasure, indeed.