Hal Coase and Eccolo

Hal Coase, a professor at The American University of Rome, has recently released his

new poetry collection, Eccolo, with Carcanet press. This collection gathers roughly ten years of writing shaped by small moments of recognition. The title, Italian for “There it is!” captures the feeling of the collection. Coase describes it as “what you shout in your head” when seeing a glimpse of the sea at the end of a long drive, finding the book you were looking for or spotting a friend in a crowd. These are brief, daily epiphanies that arrive just as quickly as they disappear.

In Eccolo, the poems are not just presented as fixed destinations, but instead, Coase describes them as half-hidden things, places we pass through or wait within. His work has various literary and philosophical influences, including Sandro Penna, James Schuyler, Maria Zambrano and Roland Barthes. Throughout the collection, poetry appears less as a tool for explanation than as a practice of attention, a way of sitting with uncertainty rather than resolving it. Meaning is allowed to hesitate, to wander and to lead the reader a bit off course.

Much of Eccolo was written during Coase’s twenties, a decade that he characterizes as one shaped by trial, error and discovery (or as his friend describes, your twenties “are for fucking up”). Rather than approaching the project with the intention of writing a book, Coase describes the collection as something that formed gradually. The poems were gathered from what he calls “half-hidden curios” he had found along the way, rather than deliberately planned. That organic process gives a sense of movement and openness.

At the core, Eccolo is a meditation on being lost and found simultaneously. It suggests that poetry is more of a companion rather than an escape. It is a way of staying with confusion, interruption, desire and beauty as they unfold. In leading readers where they are already unsure, Coase’s collection reminds us that uncertainty itself is a form of connection and that not knowing where we stand can sometimes feel like arrival.