Donald Hall

"Former poet laureate Donald Hall selects the essential work from a life in poetry." --

Donald Hall's remarkable life in poetry -- a career capped by his appointment as U.S. poet laureate in 2006 -- comes alive in this richly detailed, self-revealing memoir.

You might expect the fact of dying-the dying of a beloved wife and fellow poet-to make for a bleak and lonely tale. But Donald Hall's poignant and courageous poetry, facing that dread fact, involves us all: the magnificent, humorous, and gifted woman, Jane Kenyon, who suffered and died, the doctors and nurses who tried but failed to save her, the neighbors, friends, and relatives who grieved for her, the husband who sat by her while she lived and...

The first full-length volume of poems in a decade by the former poet laureate of the United States. He illuminates the evocative, iconic objects of deep memory--"a cowbell," "a white stone perfectly round," "a three-legged milking stool"--that serve to foreground the rich meditations on time and mortality that run through his remarkable new collection. While Hall's devoted readers will recognize many of his long-standing preoccupations--baseball,...

Donald Hall's fourteenth collection opens with an epigraph from the Urdu poet Faiz: "The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved." In that poetic tradition, as in The Painted Bed, the beloved might be a person or something else -- life itself, or the disappearing countryside. Hall's new poems further the themes of love, death, and mourning so powerfully introduced in his Without (1998), but from the distance of passed time. A long poem,...

" Donald Hall, drawing on his own childhood memories to create an instant-classic Christmas story, gives himself the thing he most wanted but didn't get as a boy: a Christmas at Eagle Pond. It's the Christmas season of 1940 and twelve-year-old Donnie takes the train to visit his grandparents. Once there, he quickly settles into the farm's routines. In the barn, Gramp milks the cows and entertains his grandson by speaking rhymed pieces, while his grandson's...

Describes the day-to-day life of an early nineteenth-century New England family throughout the changing seasons.

In the fall of 1909, Lucy gets an early start on making Christmas presents for her family and friends, which they will open at the church's Christmas program.