Review of:

Coming to Terms

Austin, Texas:  Plain View Press, 2007

Reviewed by Jeanne Emmons in The Briar Cliff Review (Vol. 20, 2008)

Perhaps any memoir ought to do what is expressed in the title of Palmer Hall's book—come to terms with the past, reconcile with it, pull it into unity, see the present as a culmination of it. All of that is true of this collection. If, as the author says in his first essay, "to write a poem must... be dangerous," then to write a memoir must he doubly dangerous, especially one such as this, in which not only is one's personal past honestly confronted and confessed, but the author has also captured the spirit of the times. Hall compares the composition of poetry to a childhood experi  ence in a boat off the coast of northern Florida . The seven-year- old Palmer, having recently discovered he may be blind in one eye, drifts out to sea, lying down in the bottom of a wooden boat. When he raises up again, the boy is lost.

I am alone in a large body of water and I put the oars in the locks and pull the water past me. It travels under the boat, the boat does not really move. For a poem to be good, to be worth writ ing, for me at least, it has to be like that and it does not matter where it comes from.

Not knowing where his rowing will take him, the writer pulls through the deep water, smooth, scary, dangerous. The material of these essays is deep water.

I read these personal essays with a feeling of having stumbled across something familiar and half-forgotten. This is partly because I myself hail from Southeast Texas , where some of these memories take place, and partly because I remember these times, the Vietnam War era. The crosscurrents of my own memories intersect with Hall's. Although his essays depict personal memories of love, hiking, drinking, and traveling in his Mustang and Volkswagen convertibles, they are embedded in larger historical events such as the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War.

Hall treats us over and over to exquisite evocations of place. We get lost in the East Texas Big Thicket, with its mosquitoes, sloughs, feral hogs, armadillos, and carnivorous plants, and we wind up enjoying the pollution-enhanced beauty of a sunset.

Hall's treatment of his Vietnam experience evokes not only the war itself but the place and its people. Of that war's veterans and their memories of Vietnam, he says, "It's always there, sitting in the landscapes of our minds...." And the landscapes of Vietnam haunt him. Of hiking in the U.S., he says, "I find myself not exactly flashing back, with all the unpleasant connotations that accompany that phrase, but seeing once again the hills and low mountains of the Central Highlands in Vietnam, hearing the waters of the South China Sea at Chu Lai, looking again into a schoolyard in Pleiku and seeing a giant Buddha smashed apart." In Vietnam we sit with Hall on his berm, watch napalm explosions, and drink Chianti on Christmas. We meet not only Hall's fellow soldiers, but also various Vietnamese civilians with whom, as an interpreter, he could converse in Vietnamese.

Hall ' s portrayal of the people of Vietnam is sensitive and humane. He and a group of fellow soldiers began an English language school for teens. This feel for a beautiful country and people being destroyed may partly account for why, upon returning to the states, he joined "GI's United Against the War" and, like so many of his generation, began protesting the war.

Some of the most memorable moments of this book take place on boats. In "Coming to Terms with Dad," Hall remembers being on a fishing boat with his father, out past "Patty's Island," off the coast of Florida . A storm comes up and the motor goes out. The father reassures his son, and while the young Hall enjoys the excitement of the thunderstorm and the pitching sea, the father takes the motor apart, lubricates it, and puts it back together again, finally succeeding in starting it up and getting them to shore. The adult Hall later visits Matagorda Island off the coast of Texas, alone, paddling a canoe and trawling a net. When he debarks, he gathers the shrimp he has caught in the net and later cooks himself a meal on the beach over a driftwood fire and thinks of his father, who was lost at sea, and of the Vietnamese shrimpers who trawl the Texas coast.

There is much humor in this book. In a piece called "Walking Out on Things," Hall discusses various books and movies he has walked out on (or nearly walked out on), including Forrest Gump, Atlas Shrugged in the John Galt section, and a mass in which the priest told Hall's son he was holding his hands improperly for communion. Hall's humor usually has an edge and is often mixed with a satiric depiction of class snobbery, injustice, racism, and simple stupidity. Hall depicts his hilarious 40th high school reunion, at a country club on a golf course where all the holes and water elements are named after people who have hurt Hall's family: "They own the factories that gave my mother asbestosis; they own the refineries my father worked in and they own the sulfur company that killed him when his poorly-maintained ship sank." This social criticism is some of the deep water that slides beneath the boat of Hall's prose, as he pulls us through his memories.

These essays are written in a clear, direct style with a dry wit and a refreshing absence of hype. Hall's occasional swipes of malice are reserved for the rich, the powerful and the cruel, and the reader is always buoyed by the pervasive impression of quiet kinship with other struggling humans. Coming to Terms vividly captures both the times and Hall's own compelling personal journey. As he says of his childhood, "those times come back and lordy, yes, they were hard, but they were good in so many ways."

Jeanne Emmons, editor