Hazel Hall is an Australian poet, musicologist and convenor of the School of Music Poets in Canberra. Her doctoral dissertation (1984) explored the relationship between speech and song, reflecting her special interest in the musicality of poetry. Hazel has published tanka, haiku and other poetic styles in many anthologies and journals including The Canberra Times, Blithe Spirit, Burley, Cattails, Concealing our Secrets, Eucalypt, First Refuge, From Ink to Paper, Gusts, The House is Not Quiet and The World is Not Calm, Kokako, Not Very Quiet, Presence, Skryptic Magazine, Skylark, Sotto, First Refuge, Visible Ink Anthology, and Wild. She has facilitated tanka workshops and judged tanka contests in Australia and abroad. Her publications include Sugar Loaf and Humming Birds with John Collard (Burmac 2013), Flood, Fire and Drought (Ginninderra Press 2015) with Suzanne Edgar, Kathy Kituai, Sandra Renew, One Last Border (Ginninderra 2015) with Moya Pacey and Sandra Renew, eggshell sky (2017) with two calligraphers and Parkinsons’ artists, and Step by Step (Picaro 2018), a tai chi chapbook with radio presenter Angelina Egan. She has been published in Red Moon Anthology and featured on overseas blogs and websites. Two books are close to completion: Passage, based on her visits to India, and Memories of Sound, which explores her ongoing musical travels.

"Moonrise Over the Siding offers poems of intimacy, keen observation, poignancy, awareness and use of all the senses and occasionally, wry humour. The collection is organised in themed sections, each headlined with a thoughtfully selected artwork by Robert Tingey that informs and illustrates the title of each section. Each section contains individual tanka and longer works, including tanka prose, renga and tanka and haiku sequences. Hall’s individual tanka capture the nuances of nature, relationships, situations, occasions and people. Music plays a subtle but important role in many poems, with its power to invoke a setting and use as metaphor. The poet’s sensitivity and awareness is apparent in each carefully composed poem. When writing with other poets, there is a keen sense of communication and empathy between each of the poets, while each maintains a separate style." – Carmel Summers"