Jean Hall
Biography
’I have studied and lived in France and Spain, now live in Highgate Village, north London. Since my first job at La Librairie Hachette in London, I have worked as a translator in Paris, taught English at the Bri-Am Institute, Madrid, Stills librarian for Warner-Pathé, photo-journalist and more recently, as an archivist. I loved skiing, competed for GB in international journalists’ skiing competitions, SCIJ, in many countries. My poems have been widely published in anthologies, magazines and newspapers: Splinters of Light, In The Company of Poets, Still Life, Warning May Contain Nuts, Fanfare, Herrings, Magma, Finished Creatures, West Sussex Gazette,Times of India, among others.’
I was first inspired by the rhythm of Longfellow’s Hiawatha, which I learnt at school and can still recite, as well as Shakespeare’s Henry V’s 'band of brothers’ speech and Mark Antony’s ‘honourable man’ speech in Julius Caesar, again from my schooldays. I love Philip Larkin, Jacques Prévert, Pablo Neruda, Garcia Lorca and a host of modern poets including Niall Campbell, Paul Stephenson, Hannah Sullivan and DA Prince. Currently, my favourite anthology is Home Front: 2 British, 2 American poets' poems about their men going off to war and the families left behind.
The Poem
Consequences
I would dance with the one who created the sky
alive with the ghosts of other people I’ve been
or rather commune with lovers I’ve known
as skilfully as sliding my bow across a violin
and wonder if our minds are just like marionettes
or whether we are pulling the strings
and will I have time to walk all London’s streets
before they’re all mapped and how strange that everyone
who knew me before agrees that I’ve changed
and I think to myself if it’s true what a survey says
that one in five would be willing to have sex with robots
I’d let my feet move with the power of a pantechnicon
past empty wine bottles from recycled lives
and seeing a rudderless glider and hot-air balloon soar
into the freeness of blue wish I could be free
to go back to the past from another direction.