Neither Are Crows - Terry Rae Hall

What I found triumphant about Neither Are Crows is the humility, accuracy, and sometimes gentle, sometimes dark, humor of the poems. There isn't any showing off, and yet there is subtle and constant trickery of the best sort. The poems remind me of the work of Robert Francis in their attention to detail and sound, though the world they describe is nothing like his rural Andover. The people and the landscape are one. They grow out of each other, out of flat lands and prairies. Take these lines from the tender elegy to the poet's parents:

Where my father was stable and solid, the ground,

my mother was the lightning rod, a lure for the electric and alive.

And I was the wire that bonded them, that kept the house from

catching fire.

In every poem, these sorts of moments occur. The book is held together by allusions to The Wizard of Oz, and that conceit is fully justified. Terry Rae Hall deals superbly with both the mythos and reality of her midwestern landscape. Not a single poem in Neither Are Crows is unnecessary. Not a single poem fails to give pleasure.

-Joe Weil, 2024 finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize