Life & Customs begins and ends in Otago. Landscape and national identity serve as inspirations as the poetry collection circles through diverse places and moments in history. It is full of stories: a girl slips into an anorexic silence as cold as Antarctica; lovers wander hand in hand into a southern future.

Hall’s choral and orchestral background has given her poems a musical quality, with Life & Customs picking up the rhythms of a maze. In her unique voice it is hope that emerges as a stubborn possibility.