As ITIS: dense, compact, elliptic, fierce, without evasion. Then they put our cages on wheels and let us (stinking of snacks) push them-- we push them out of their parking-lots into fields of wild carrot and chicory but they always find them and drag them back hove each cage into the muzzle of the next cage. In Amanuensis (Brick, 64 pages, unpriced), Phil Hall has come, by strife with words and their embedded values, to a technique of compression that reminds of Paul Celan`s knotted poems: they beam straight through the skull. So that: "It is a lark drinking rain-water from a sun-dial" and "oat-dust gold along the snout-beam." Poetry that recalls the organs of the body, that invents and compounds verbs, nouns, and adjectives to reach toward what cannot he spoken, only named, if we use all the names, without censoringour hands` flutter. It is poetry that "has been taught mockingbirds well." Which is why, perhaps, Hall`s work has been little recognized by those grocers who are so invested in the cages and parking lots of the literary Supermarket. Never mind. It is recognized by those who want, instead of supermarkets, food.