Montreal Review of Books calls The Certainty Dream 'brilliant'
'The great Italian poet Eugenio Montale once said that 'poetry is a dream dreamed in the presence of reason.' Kate Hall's brilliant debut draws on René Descartes to dream such dreams ...
Hall's spirit guide in the realm of the dream is the mynah bird, a brilliant choice as Descartes differentiated human begins from animals on the basis of language. But mynahs can learn to talk, making them a borderline case. Hall's sympathy is with birds, and some of her most memorable poems are about them. Images of containers - boxes, glass jars, vitrines - also run through the book, the sorts of constraints (and by implication, categories) that the mind imposes on reality; dreams subvert rigid orders.
The tour de force in the collection is 'Suspended in the Space of Reason: A Short Thesis,' a poem cast as a subversive inquiry into reason. It is delivered in a parody of an academic thesis on whether we see things or only our own minds, and Descartes provides the epigraph, a claim that what he thought was seen with his own eyes was grasped only with the mind. The subversion in Hall's pseudo-thesis comes from the eruption of contingent facts into the mind of the narrator, such as chipotle-lime mustard, elephants (of course: they're always in the room), Mars rovers, and game shows ...
It is bracing to read a poet who can engage with the ideas of G. E. Moore, Ronald Searle, Blaise Pascal, and Daniel Dennett ... Kate Hall unites philosophy and wisdom - without forgetting the chipotle-lime mustard.'
