Donald Hall

From a former Poet Laureate, a new collection of essays delivering a gloriously unexpected view from the vantage point of very old age Donald Hall has lived a remarkable life of letters, a career capped by a National Medal of the Arts, awarded by the president. Now, in the “unknown, unanticipated galaxy” of very old age, he is writing searching essays that startle, move, and delight. In the transgressive and horrifyingly funny “No Smoking,” he looks back over his lifetime, and several of his ancestors’ lifetimes, of smoking unfiltered cigarettes, packs of them every day. Hall paints his past: “Decades followed each other — thirty was terrifying, forty I never noticed because I was drunk, fifty was best with a total change of life, sixty extended the bliss of fifty . . .” And, poignantly, often joyfully, he limns his present: “When I turned eighty and rubbed testosterone on my chest, my beard roared like a lion and gained four inches.” Most memorably, Hall writes about his enduring love affair with his ancestral Eagle Pond Farm and with the writing life that sustains him, every day: “Yesterday my first nap was at 9:30 a.m., but when I awoke I wrote again.”

Essays After Eighty

Distinguished poet Donald Hall reflects on the meaning of work, solitude, and love “The best new book I have read this year, of extraordinary nobility and wisdom. It will remain with me always.” —Louis Begley, The New York Times “A sustained meditation on work as the key to personal happiness. . . . Life Work reads most of all like a first-person psychological novel with a poet named Donald Hall as its protagonist. . . . Hall’s particular talents ultimately [are] for the memoir, a genre in which he has few living equals. In his hands the memoir is only partially an autobiographical genre. He pours both his full critical intelligence and poetic sensibility into the form.” —Dana Gioia, Los Angeles Times “Hall . . . here offers a meditative look at his life as a writer in a spare and beautifully crafted memoir. Devoted to his art, Hall can barely wait for the sun to rise each morning so that he can begin the task of shaping words.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “I [am] delighted and moved by Donald Hall’s Life Work, his autobiographical tribute to sheer work—as distinguished from labor—as the most satisfying and ennobling of activities, whether one is writing, canning vegetables or playing a dung fork on a New Hampshire farm.” —Paul Fussell, The Boston Globe Donald Hall is the author of numerous prizewinning volumes of poetry, including The One Day, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, essays, children’s books, and criticism. His new collection of short stories, The Willow Temple, will be published by Houghton Mifflin this spring.

Life Work

"New essays from the vantage point of very old age, once again "alternately lyrical and laugh-out-loud funny, "* from the former poet laureate of the United States *(New York Times)"--

notes nearing ninety

A carnival of losses

A collection of poems elegizing the author's late wife examines her suffering and death, the doctors and nurses who tried to help her, and the friends and relatives that grieved for her

Poems

Without

Former poet laureate of the United States Donald Hall’s final collection of essays, from the vantage point of very old age, once again “alternately lyrical and laugh‐out‐loud funny.”* *(New York Times) “Why should a nonagenarian hold anything back?” Donald Hall answers his own question in these self-knowing, fierce, and funny essays on aging, the pleasures of solitude, and the sometimes astonishing freedoms arising from both. Nearing ninety at the time of writing, he intersperses memories of exuberant days in his youth, with uncensored tales of literary friendships spanning decades—with James Wright, Richard Wilbur, Seamus Heaney, and other luminaries. Cementing his place alongside Roger Angell and Joan Didion as a generous and profound chronicler of loss, this final work is as original and searing as anything Hall wrote during his extraordinary literary lifetime.

Notes Nearing Ninety

A Carnival of Losses

This is a collection of stories diverse in subject, but sutured together by the limitless affection the author holds for the land and the people of New England. Donald Hall tells about life on a small farm where, as a boy, he spent summers with his grandparents. Gradually the boy grows to be a young man, sees his grandparents aging, the farm become marginal, and finally, the cows sold and the barn abandoned. But these are more than nostalgic memories, for in the measured and tender prose of each episode are signs of the end of things - a childhood, perhaps a culture. In an Epilogue written for this edition, Donald Hall describes his return to the farm twenty-five years later, to live the rest of his life in the house of string. We take pleasure in bringing back into print this classic account of boyhood summers in old New England, with the addition of an Epilogue and an album of family snapshots.

String Too Short to be Saved

Gathers poems from each period of Hall's career, including "The One Day," the long poem that won the National Book Critics Circle Award

Old and New Poems

The One Day and Poems 1947-1990

Ploughshares Summer/Fall 1982 Guest-Edited by Donald Hall

a memoir of a life in poetry

Unpacking the boxes

The celebrated author of Willow Temple and Without offers a poignant tribute to his late wife, poet Jane Kenyon, their life together, and the devastating illness that claimed her life, all set against the backdrop of the New Hampshire landscape that they called home. Reprint.

Life with Jane Kenyon

The Best Day the Worst Day

While Donnie visits his grandparents' farm during the holiday season of 1940, he listens to his grandfather's spoken poetry and wonders at a beautiful but obsolete sleigh before a snowstorm challenges his ability to return home.

Christmas at Eagle Pond

An anthology of works by modern American poets

Contemporary American Poetry

A beautifully written collection of poems explores the themes of love, death and mourning, revisiting the author's childhood home and its fascinating history, and exploring his acceptance of a new life in old age. Reprint.

The Painted Bed

An anthology of American poems, arranged chronologically, from colonial alphabet rhymes to Native American cradle songs to contemporary poems.

The Oxford Illustrated Book of American Children's Poems

A dog and a cat take turns explaining what is wonderful about being who they are.

I Am the Dog, I Am the Cat

Sven Birkerts

From getting topic ideas to revising the final draft, this classic resource teaches the basics of writing. A comprehensive rhetoric with a handbook section provides all the needed coverage in one brief text, and suggested writing assignments offer practice in writing with the reader in mind.

Writing Well

Thomas Walter Laqueur

Helaine Posner

MIT List Visual Arts Center

"Corporal Politics documents an exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center featuring the works of eight internationally recognized artists: Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, Rona Pondick, Annette Messager, Robert Gober, David Wojnarowicz, Lilla LoCurto, and William Outcault. The work of these artists showcases a striking, recent artistic phenomenon: the disturbing isolation of body parts, internal organs, and bodily fluids to express the vulnerability of our bodies to physical violence, sexual oppression, and ultimate loss. From a sculpture of glass sperm to images confronting AIDS, the works of art represented here poignantly question ideals of coherent identity and an integrated self in our times."--Back cover.

Donald Hall

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