Donald Hall
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Donald Hall
This serious, ambitious, and graceful book-length poem is the masterwork of one of America’s foremost contemporary poets.
Donald Hall, Barbara Cooney
“Like a pastoral symphony translated into picture book format, the stunning combination of text and illustrations recreates the mood of 19-century rural New England.” —The Horn Book.
Without: Poems
Donald Hall
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 afterward sat in their house alone with his pain, self-pity, and fury; and those of us who till now had nothing to do with it. As Donald Hall writes, “Remembered happiness is agony; so is remembered agony.”
Without will touch every feeling reader, for everyone has suffered loss and requires the fellowship of elegy. In the earth’s oldest poem, when Gilgamesh howls of the death of Enkidu, a grieving reader of our own time may feel a kinship, across the abyss of four thousand years, with a Sumerian king. In Without Donald Hall speaks to us all of grief, as a poet lamenting the death of a poet, as a husband mourning the loss…
The Museum of Clear Ideas: Poems
Donald Hall
This is Donald Hall’s most advanced works extending his poetic reach even beyond his recent volumes, The One Day and Old and New Poems. Conflict dominates this book, and conflict unites it. Hall takes poetry as an instrument for revelation and discovery, whether in “Another Elegy,” a comic, pathetic portrait of a (fictional) contemporary poet, or in “Baseball,” in which a narrator called K.C. (swinging his bat from the Mudville of the poet’s desk) fantastically attempts to explain the all-American game to a long-dead German artist. “Baseball” occupies nine innings, each inning composed of nine stanzas, each stanza composed of nine lines, each line composed of nine syllables. The title series of poems, “The Museum of Clear Ideas,” imitates, but does not translate, the first book of the Odes of Horace. A cool, witty voice identifies itself as Horace Horsecollar, an old Walt Disney character; yet no sooner does one voice establish itself than another voice contradicts it. By such means are ideas exhibited and clarified. The book’s final section, “Extra Innings,”…- 5 works
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