Blank - Jake Wild Hall

'You are grieving at the bar' begins one of the poems in a book as intimate as it is incantational. In many ways, these words offer a microcosm for Jake Wild Hall's Blank: a song of shared loss, anaesthetising 'solutions', quiet recovery. With the immediacy of a camera lens, these poems bear out the internal conflict between the vulnerability of hope and the safety of detachment. Language soars and contracts: reaching out in prayer-'london is the world until it sings all the wrong hymns in your church', down into the body-'the things i have been avoiding turn to ulcers in my mouth'. Blank doesn't have all the answers, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a better talisman as you ask the questions.