Donald Hall

A former poet laureate presents a new collection of essays delivering an unexpected view from the vantage point of very old age.

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. Hall's invaluable record of the making of a poet begins with his childhood in Depression-era suburban Connecticut, where he first realized poetry was "secret, dangerous, wicked, and delicious," and ends with what he calls "the planet of antiquity," a time of life dramatically punctuated...

In The Back Chamber, Donald Hall 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 this remarkable collection. While Hall's devoted readers will recognize many of his long-standing preoccupations-baseball, the family farm, love, sex, and friendship-what will strike them as new is the fierce,...

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, "Daylilies...

"When I was twelve I wrote my first poem, and by fourteen I decided that's what I'd do my whole life. I don't regret it." - from the afterword by Donald Hall. Donald Hall was an American master, one of the nation's most beloved and accomplished poets. Here, in his eighties, having taken stock of the body of his work-rigorous, gorgeous verse that is the result of seventy years of "ambition and pleasure"-he strips it down. The Selected Poems of Donald...

A contemplative selection of twelve short stories from the celebrated author Donald Hall, Willow Temple focuses on the effects of divorce, adultery, and neglect. Hall's stories are reminiscent of those of Alice Munro and William Maxwell in their mastery of form and their ability to trace the emotional fault lines connecting generations. "From Willow Temple" is the indelible story of a child's witness of her mother's adultery and the loss that underlies...

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...

Donald Hall draws on his own childhood memories and 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' place in rural New Hampshire. 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 Donnie's eyes are drawn...

The pressure is on Galactic Sports Hall of Fame center Daron Soimvell, aka Superstud. Tamara is going for the impossible, a three-peat of the Galactic Octagla championship. To get the position they want in the playoffs, they have to take this set of games with their bitter rivals Pendrae United, the team they beat in the finals the last two years.No doubt at some point the team will be in a tight spot, and Coach Isley will call a slingshot play. Daron...

Tamara is going for the near impossible, a three-peat of the Galactic Octagla championship. That was before the game with arch rivals Pendrae United that hospitalized Hall of Fame center Daron and ended his career. Now his teammates are looking for the rematch.But that isn't all. Daron's family works for notorious drug lord Ghen Kulgalu, and they don't think his "accident" was an accident. They're determined to find the truth.Octagla is a rough, fast-paced...