Reviews of "The Drowning Fish".........

"John G Hall's poetry is both visceral and delicate.

It is haunted by an angry spirituality that never loses its sense of humour or hope. From condoms to Iraq, from Jesus to Alzheimer's, these poems are as brutally honest as they are beautiful."

Aoife Mannix – author of ‘The Trick of Foreign Words’, Irish poet .

"John Hall’s poetry has the gritty edge of a contemporary visionary in active development. He’s not afraid to let the poem happen to him as experience & he’s not imprisoned by form but open to its changing demands. Whether writing of broken heartedness or dealing with experiences of a more directly political nature, his poems are always directed towards the future. So that outrage is never far from rage, nor affirmation from bitter actuality. This is an important book by one of England’s most important younger poets."

Jack Hirschman – author of “Front Line-Selected Poems” Poet & activist.

"Hall constantly asserts the imagists instinct – that pared-down thought, the sure gaze. With each line a brush stroke, and framed by what he makes seem acres of white, these poems strive towards the condition of poetic quanta. At their best, they urge themselves into distinctive intensity."

Mario Petrucci- poet/ freelance writer, educator, researcher & essayist.

"John G. Hall fuses several key ways of being a poet in the early 21st century: the lyric,and the experimental. His work has a spiky immediacy, and an articulate ache, that reminds me of Lawrence and sometimes the American Beats: he lets the moment speak its fire and its cold. In this sense, he boldly side-steps the Mainstream/Post-modern divide, and simply acts as if poets still had a public voice, and deserved the public's ear. This collection suggests Hall is an emerging voice in the UK, one perhaps unexpected, but promising much."

Todd Swift, editor of 100 Poets against the War (Salt, Cambridge, 2003).