In a writing workshop, the American poet Ed Ochester once bellowed over one of my poems, “There is no philosophy in poetry.” Generally, I find such grand pronouncements about poetry perplexing and not very helpful, but I made a note of this one. Then I mostly forgot about it until, reading Kate Hall’s debut collection, The Certainty Dream, I wondered whether poems are written for the mind alone.

Like Wallace Stevens, Hall often blends rigorous philosophical thought with playful, creative nonsense. The book’s longest poem, “Suspended in the Space of Reason: A Short Thesis,” for example, uses the structure of an academic thesis (abstract, introduction, literature review, and so on) to explore the lengths to which we go to “assuage epistemic hunger,” but the poem is also packed with wacky imagery, including echo-locating bats, celebrity suicide notes, and the Mars rovers poetically named Spirit and Opportunity. Hall invokes great thinkers (Hume, Descartes, and Pascal, for example) to address some grand philosophical questions: What is real? Where does the past go? Does God exist? How can I know for sure? Many of the poems enact a desire to build a structure of logic around a world that refuses to adhere to logic’s laws, a project that sometimes seems philosophical first and poetic second.

Much of the book captures that vague state of consciousness between sleep and waking when dreams still seem real and the laws of language, narrative, and logic are still loose. Hall’s subconscious is busy with wild animals, odd machines, and lots and lots of birds, and her penchant for startling imagery helps to transport us to a dreamlike state: God hides inside a pepper grinder, a herd of antelope eat the siding off of a house, dump trucks file out of a suitcase, and someone (George Herbert?) has left an orange tree at Lost and Found.

These deeply weird visions are balanced by straightforward, declarative diction; there is no airy dream-talk here. Hall’s speakers sound knowing, but their knowing is a kind of order futilely imposed onto the chaos of the mind. “There is art, / unless there is so much missing, / we cannot build a structure around it,” she writes in “Water Tower, 1998-2000,” an hommage to sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s translucent Soho water towers. Whiteread’s sculptures, which played on ideas of fullness and emptiness, are a fitting parallel for Hall’s poems, which push the limits of lack. There is so much stream-of-consciousness here, so many imaginative leaps taken by the writer and required of the reader, it is often difficult to discern what, if anything, holds a poem together.

It’s only appropriate that a collection so fundamentally concerned with the workings of the mind would inspire a hunger for logic and certainty, but I sometimes hungered, too, for a more sensual approach. These poems sometimes veer too far into academic territory — self-consciously and playfully, but frequently enough that they work mostly from the neck up. I’m not sure I agree with Ochester’s dictum, but this might be among the perils that arise when philosophy and poetry overlap.

Abby Paige is a Montreal-based writer and performer. You can visit her on-line at http://www.abbypaige.com/.