“Poet, pirate, visual artist, maritimer, nomadic soul par excellence”

Nat Hall is a Norman-born, Shetland-based poet & visual artist, educated on French and British shores in  Aix-en-Provence, Oxford and Edinburgh. Member of Shetland Arts, the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics and Federation Writers (Scotland). Contributor to the New Shetlander, NorthWords Now, Stravaig, The  Poetry Scotland’s Open Mouse, Artipeeps (England) and Poemata (Canada). 

Anthologized in Shetland, Scotland, England & Canada, co-author of From Shore to Shoormal/D’un  rivage à l’autre (BJP, 2016), author of Compass Head (Nordland Publishing, 2016) and translator of  Georges D’If, Shetland (2018). Currently working on second poetry collection.

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This world, either secret or exposed, depicted in words, pixels, pigments

By Nat Hall

My work evolves within a kaleidoscope of visual sky-sea-land scapes – physical, emotional, real, imaginary – either executed through the pen, lens or paint brush. Whatever tool I choose to use, I celebrate our homeworld, undeterred by cultural or geophysical barriers. My two main instruments, (pen & camera), follow me more or less everywhere, wherever my nomadic heart or intellect chooses to go.

Writing, painting without frontiers – being at one with the world.

Inspiration usually emanates from a moment encapsulated in a single glance, a scent, a sound (either natural or man-made), a dream, a story heard or read or even a photograph found by accident in a magazine. Since childhood, my imagination has notably been fashioned by authors & artists who made me listen to wolf cries, whale, blackbird songs, waves crushing at wooden bows… People who shared the colours & textures of the world – folk who generated dreams. Whether I paint with words in poetry or flash fiction, pixels or with pigments, I attempt to adhere to two favourite ancient precepts of wisdom: accepting the kinship of all creatures and acknowledging unity within the universe.

simmerdim

we have aligned to sun & moon,

what does it mean to the shalder?

bright calishang,

cockiloorie instead of ice,

linties & waap,

feverish song of the blackbird,

wings slashing through a lavish sky,

patchworks of matrimonial cotton grass

where men and birds share same hillsides, where peat turns into pyramids.

ever ending,

over-saturated sense of life –

flick of feathers, twisting below this industrious horizon,

fishermen, birds, as if tradition never dies…

that perpetual canvas of blue in defiance to hands of time,

like a gigantic bonfire, we look through the eye of the sun