Creekwater Mansions, Ian Hall’s rollicking debut, “contains multitudes” à la Whitman, but while The Father of Free Verse sang of himself, Hall prefers to tell tall tales of Appalachian grandmothers, drunkards, preachers, rednecks, old-timers, and lovers. He reveres the rural poor even while satirizing them. Diogenes, not Plato, could be his patron philosopher. 

Many of these poems evoke Larry Levis’s long lines and winding narratives without losing their voice to the late poet’s alluring darkness. Hall’s diction—wide-ranging, etched with humor and Southernisms—keeps my attention: “slop-giddy hogs & sporting dogs”; “I’vent got anything / sage to say”; “ . . . sveltely / gotup in coat-&-tails”; “ink-goiter”; “deft of shoe”; “Rapture stash”; this is just a taste of his “syrup of the Appalachian idiom” (12, 11, 26, 29, 39, 40, 120).

Hall’s key influence, even more than the aforementioned poets, might be Mark Twain, quoted for thematic purpose at the start of the first of three sections: “To look back on one’s childhood is to get the cloudy sense of having been a prince, once, in some enchanted far-off land, & of being in exile now, & desolate” (15). Like the great American novelist, Hall embraces the outlandish and colloquial when he writes of missed opportunities, death, and memory. When his poems don’t get too drunk on their own words, they surprise me with their eccentric tenderness.

At heart, Hall is a family poet, a love poet, and a poet of the people who employs hyperbole, innuendo, and description to strong effect. In the opening poem “Recoil,” a two-pager in couplets, the speaker remembers his grandfather who “had an over-under / he called Pardon Me” (17). Just a boy, the grandson attempts to help his father mourn “Pap” as they sort through the deceased’s clothes. In “Nocturne for August, Ailing Things,” the poet paints a “hauntological” portrait of 
                                                    …eyesore: the toothed spearmint
                                                                  of Camino hoods, trucks tucked
                                                     in the dust of last decade.

                                                    Jumper cables like macabre spaghetti, 
                                                                   pistons, schismed manifolds: a Gettysburg 
                                                    of tinker & shrapnel to paw through. . . (19).
The language has a strong backbone of assonance that steadies the reader through this dizzying scene of “ . . . jungle-gyms . . . made / of hulled out septic tanks . . .” and “antibiotic pleas . . . ” (19-20). And these are just the first two poems.

As the collection develops, we meet a mother who is “ . . . pious / as hell & she doesn’t just pretend / to like stale bread” (28). We observe, in “Pure Fool,” the titular speaker and his lover who “ . . . gnawed on the hock / of conversation for hours” (37). And in “The Hay Sufferer,” a geezer tells his life story in between “ . . . tax[ing] / his hanky with a wheeze,” while the speaker notices the man’s “ . . . sunburst shirt, suspenders / in the tackiest magenta . . . ” (83). Other characters we encounter include a horse-doctor, a mute boy named Judas Iscariot Jacobs, a romantic day laborer, and an aged academic. 

Hall is arguably at his best in the love poems, especially “Love in the Time of Company Towns,” whose title, of course, references Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. Here, the speaker considers how to “earn a troglodyte living” (49) and “course[s] [his] hand up your spine / like a Geiger counter . . . ” (50). It all feels outrageous yet believable—a gritty, Appalachian magical realism in verse.

The verbal richness of Creekwater Mansions gives me a sense of vertigo. As a reader who often favors minimalism in poetry, Hall’s maximalist monologues persuade me that, sometimes, more can be more. His poems run wild. The reader charges through them like pages in a novel, returning for the gallivanting wordplay and tough characters.