Donald Hall – författare

Co-authored by two esteemed writers, Writing Well, is a beautifully-written and thoroughly readable guide to the craft of writing prose. 

For nearly forty years, Donald Hall has stood in the front rank of American poets. The title poem, an autobiographical sequence, takes Hall from his boyhood to his growing acquaintance with poets--seniors like Robert Frost and contemporaries like Robert Bly. It sees him growing into manhood, fatherhood, grandfatherhood, and a happy second marriage. When his life inevitably moves into vicissitude, even tragedy, he will tell the dreadful truth about himself and the challenges of his time on earth.

Donald Hall believes that American poetry, at the present moment, thrives both in quality and in leadership. In his latest collection of essays, reviews, and interviews, Hall counters the increasingly publicized view that poetry has an ever-diminishing importance in contemporary American culture. He resents the endlessly repeated cliché that finds poetry unpopular and losing popularity. Thus: Death to the Death of Poetry.

Throughout the pages of this latest offering in the Poets on Poetry series, Hall returns again and again to the theme of poetry''s health, and offers essays praising contemporary poets, who serve as examples of poetry''s thriving condition. In addition, Death to the Death of Poetry collects interviews in which Hall discusses the work of poetry--revisions, standards, the psychology and sociology of the poet''s life.

The collection will be warmly received by Donald Hall''s large readership, enhanced in 1993 by publication of two exemplary volumes: The Museum of Clear Ideas, his eleventh book of poetry; and his essay Life Work, which brought him both new and returning readers.

"Alternately lyrical and laugh-out-loud funny."--New York Times"Deliciously readable . . . Donald Hall, if abandoned by the muse of poetry, has wrought his prose to a keen autumnal edge." -- Wall Street JournalHis entire life, Donald Hall has dedicated himself to the written word, putting together a storied career as a poet, essayist, and memoirist. Now, in the "unknown, unanticipated galaxy" of very old age, he is writing essays that startle, move, and delight. In Essays After Eighty, Hall ruminates on his past: "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 . . ." He also addresses 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.""Alluring, inspirational hominess . . . Essays After Eighty is a treasure . . . balancing frankness about losses with humor and gratitude." -- Washington Post"A fine book of remembering all sorts of things past, Essays After Eighty is to be treasured." -- Boston Globe

Donald Hall''s invaluable record of the making of a poet begins with his childhood in Depression-era suburban Connecticut, where as the doted-upon son of dramatically thwarted parents he first realized poetry was "secret, dangerous, wicked, and delicious." Hall eloquently writes of the poetry and books that moved and formed him as a child and young man, and of adolescent efforts at poetry writing—an endeavor he wryly describes as more hormonal than artistic. His painful, formative days at Exeter are followed by a poetic self-liberation of sorts at Harvard and in the post-war university scene at Oxford.

After a failed first marriage Hall meets and marries Jane Kenyon, and the two poets return to Eagle Pond. Fittingly, the family home that loomed large in Hall''s childhood is where he grows old, and at eighty learns finally "to live in the moment—as you have been told to do all your life."

Unpacking the Boxes is a revelatory and tremendously poignant memoir of one man''s life in poetry.