<div>The former U.S. poet laureate presents the essential work from across his long and celebrated career in this sweeping collection. For decades, Donald Hall produced a body of work that established him as one of America&rsquo;s most significant&mdash;and beloved&mdash;poets of his generation. Celebrated for his plainspoken yet evocative imagery and his stirring explorations of bucolic life, Hall won numerous awards, including the Robert Frost Medal, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the National Medal of Arts.When Hall reached his eighties, his health began to decline, and he announced that the ability to write poems has &ldquo;abandoned&rdquo; him. Looking back over his astonishingly rich body of work, Hall hand-picked his finest and most memorable poems for this final, concise, and essential volume.</div>

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The Selected Poems of Donald Hall

<div>The former U.S. Poet Laureate contemplates life, death, and the view from his window in these &ldquo;alternately lyrical and laugh-out-loud funny&rdquo; essays (The New York Times). From an early age, Donald Hall dedicated his life to the written word. In his long and celebrated career, he was an accomplished poet, essayist, memoirist, dramatist, and children&rsquo;s author. Now, in the &ldquo;unknown, unanticipated galaxy&rdquo; of very old age, his essays continue to startle, move, and delight. In Essays After Eighty, Hall ruminates on his past: &ldquo;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 . . .&rdquo; He also addresses his present: &ldquo;When I turned eighty and rubbed testosterone on my chest, my beard roared like a lion and gained four inches.&rdquo; 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: &ldquo;Yesterday my first nap was at 9:30 a.m., but when I awoke I wrote again.&rdquo; &ldquo;Deliciously readable&hellip;Donald Hall, if abandoned by the muse of poetry, has wrought his prose to a keen autumnal edge.&rdquo; &mdash;The Wall Street Journal</div>

Essays After Eighty

<div>This collection drawn from more than forty years of the poet’s work is “a superb introduction to newcomers and a sumptuous offering to familiars” (Publishers Weekly). Former US Poet Laureate Donald Hall has been celebrated with numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Medal of the Arts. This volume collects some of Hall’s finest short poetry written between 1947 and 1990. Here are poems of landscape and love, of dedication and prophecy. “Our delight is in following an exceptional poet's growth and depth as he emerges with a richly playful but consummately serious voice.” —Publishers Weekly</div>

Old and New Poems

<div>The prize-winning poet’s collection of autobiographical poems is “the work of a master, all the more poignant for its frankness . . . in the face of tragedy” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette). One of America’s most celebrated poets, Donald Hall was at the height of his powers when he wrote The Old Life. Intimate, anecdotal and often funny, these autobiographical poems follow Hall from his boyhood to his developing acquaintance with fellow poets—including seniors like Robert Frost and contemporaries like Robert Bly. They chronicle Hall’s growing into manhood, fatherhood, grandfatherhood, and a happy second marriage. In the final poem, “Without,” Hall laments the illness of his late wife, Jane Kenyon. “These autobiographical poems are free of self-pity, engagingly frank without being in any sense ‘confessional,’ and often wildly comical . . . All are first-rate.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune</div>

The Old Life

<div>This retrospective collection of verse from the former US poet laureate and National Medal of Arts winner spans six decades of celebrated work. Throughout his writing life Donald Hall has garnered numerous accolades and honors, culminating in 2006 with his appointment as poet laureate of the United States. White Apples and the Taste of Stone collects more than two hundred poems from across sixty years of Hall’s celebrated career, and includes poems published in The New Yorker, the American Poetry Review, and the New York Times. Those who have come to love Donald Hall's poetry will welcome this vital and important addition to his body of work. For the uninitiated it is a spectacular introduction to this critically acclaimed and admired poet.</div>

White Apples and the Taste of Stone

<div>The former US poet laureate has crafted poems full of “unexpected insights, charms, droll observations, self-mockery, and well-earned wisdom” (Rain Taxi). 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, pitiless poignancy he reveals as his own life’s end comes into view. The Back Chamber is far from being death-haunted, but rather is lively, irreverent, erotic, hilarious, ironic, and sly—full of the life-affirming energy that has made Donald Hall one of America’s most popular and enduring poets. “For the reader boiling in triple-digit SoCal heat at the end of the summer, Donald Hall’s The Back Chamber: Poems arrives like a sudden cloudburst and shower of cooling rain . . . A former U.S. poet laureate, Hall has always had this elemental power—to vividly evoke his particular New England climate and geography so that it can’t be mistaken for any other—but what is more unexpected in this new collection of poems, his 16th, is passion.” —Los Angeles Times “The former U.S. poet laureate reaches his 20th book in unmistakably honest form, aggressively plain and unfailingly open about sex, old age, suicide, recovery, the friendship of poets, the business of poetry, dogs, New Hampshire, and baseball.” —Publishers Weekly</div>

The Back Chamber

<div>The former US poet laureate delivers a book “filled with raw sexual disclosures, rowdy anger and a self-blasting mockery” (The New York Times). 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 on the Hill 1975-1989,” moves back to the happy repossession of the poet’s old family house and its history—a structure that “persisted against assaults” as its generations of residents could not. These poems are by turns furious and resigned, spirited and despairing—”mania is melancholy reversed,” as Hall writes in another long poem, “Kill the Day.” In this book’s fourth and final section, “Ardor,” the poet moves toward acceptance of new life in old age; eros reemerges. “More controlled, more varied and more powerful, this taut follow-up volume [to Without] reexamines Hall’s grief while exploring the life he has made since. The book’s first poem, ‘Kill the Day,’ stands among the best Hall has ever written.” —Publishers Weekly “A compelling, sometimes shocking, and certainly deeply moving depiction of bereavement.” —Poetry “Hall has continued growing as a poet, and his steady readers may consider this his finest collection . . . Bleakness and beauty characterize the reminiscent lyrics that follow, too, joined by a breathtaking bluntness.” —Booklist</div>

The Painted Bed

<div>A collection of stories by the former US poet laureate, “a first-rate work by an author whose control over the tools of his genre is impeccable” (Publishers Weekly). 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 it. Three stories present David Bardo at crucial junctures of his life, beginning as a child drawn to his parents’ “cozy adult coven of drunks” and growing into a young man whose intense first affair undergirds a lifelong taste for ardor and betrayal. In this superbly perceptive collection, Hall gives memorable accounts of the passionate weight of lives. “[Hall possesses] a consistent gift for delicate description.” —The New York Times Book Review “Hall is comfortable with small stages—a tavern, a summer music camp, a farm, an artist’s studio, a junior college classroom, a cemetery, a bakery. But the quiet dramas that boil up in such places . . . are never small.” —Chicago Tribune “Understated lyricism very much in what William Carlos Williams (whom Hall often resembles) called the ‘American grain.’ Moving and memorable.” —Kirkus Reviews “A writer who attains the same high level of the game in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.” —The Boston Globe “[Willow Temple] attests to Hall’s mastery as a storyteller, the prose lyrical and elegiac as he moving unfolds each character’s frailties.” —Ploughshares</div>

Willow Temple

<div>“With The One Day, this is his best work, a modest, skeptical, and brave poetry that embodies something essential about this late American century.” —Harvard Review This is Donald Hall’s most advanced work, extending his poetic reach even beyond his recent volumes. Conflict dominates this book, and conflict unites it. Hall takes poetry as an instrument for revelation, whether in an elegy for a (fictional) contemporary poet, or in the title series of poems, whose form imitates the first book of the Odes of Horace. The book’s final section, “Extra Innings,” moves with poignancy to questions about the end of the game. “A stunning volume of testamentary verse . . . an often perfect American blend of rue and buoyancy, narrative verve and grace.” —The New Yorker “Donald Hall is our finest elegist. The Museum of Clear Ideas is as original, idiosyncratic, and un-museumlike a poetic work as we are likely to see for a long time to come.” —Richard Tillinghast, The New Criterion “Hall’s poems make ‘durable relics’ of late twentieth-century life in much the same way that Byron’s Don Juan does for the early nineteenth. The ‘clear ideas,’ however, are timeless.” —Beloit Poetry Journal “These are some of the darkest lines Donald Hall has ever composed. They move through aching poignancy through illness diagnosed, sorrow, and poignant revelation, yet the final chord is not one of despair.” —Robert Taylor, Boston Globe “A collection of powerful new poems . . . Hall’s voice is more mature and classically spare than ever, offering revelatory glimpses of wisdom.” —Publishers Weekly “A brilliantly inventive tour de force . . . A significant and engaging book.” —Library Journal</div>

Donald Hall
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Books By Donald Hall (9 Books)

The Selected Poems of Donald Hall

Essays After Eighty

Old and New Poems

The Old Life

White Apples and the Taste of Stone

The Back Chamber

The Painted Bed

Willow Temple

The Museum of Clear Ideas

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