The Old Life [Hardcover]

Donald Hall (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 20, 1996

For nearly forty years, through changes in fashion and form, Donald Hall has stood in the front rank of American poets. The Old Life comprises the title poem, which is an autobiographical sequence, preceded by two substantial poems: " The Night of the Day," which makes a thematic connection with his Old and New Poems (1990), and " The Thirteenth Inning," which bridges the gap between this book and Hall's remarkable 1993 collection, The Museum of Clear Ideas . The book concludes with heartbreaking lyric, " Without," commemorating the illness of his adored wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995. The title sequence takes Hall from his boyhood in New Haven (with summers in New Hampshire) to his education at Exeter and Harvard 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 w

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In his first book of poems since the death of his wife, the gifted poet Jane Kenyon, Hall reviews his life, considering and re-casting scenes that have haunted him. These include his great-uncle's hands, "white as Wonder bread," a ruined Halloween, and T.S. Eliot's advice to young Hall, newly arrived at Oxford: "Have you any long underwear?" It is Kenyon's death, though, that Hall is moving toward. His simple lines speak worlds about grief's searing intensity.

From Publishers Weekly

This collection has little of the sharply observed, tender lyricism that characterizes much of Hall's earlier work, yet the four sequences here reflect preoccupations that he has made his own: family, nature, rural life, baseball. Hall's oeuvre may someday stand as a poetic record of one man's life in this last half-century, but the extent to which Hall is a memoirist more than a poet is quite evident here. "The Night of the Day," the 10-page opening poem, is a precious recounting of two heifers wandering on a road; "The Thirteenth Inning" unsuccessfully attempts to relieve thoughts of death with memories of baseball games. In the 96-page title poem, Hall employs an agile three-stress line to minor effect, conveying anecdotes of a life remembered with a tenderness that the reader is not persuaded to honor. The final poem, "Without," which the publisher intrusively insists is about the death of Hall's wife, Jane Kenyon, is indeed a despairing tract, but one that seems more fruitfully framed as Hall's embittered response to e.e. cummings's jauntily styled "Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town" than as a simple elegy: "no spring no summer no autumn no winter/ no rain no peony thunder no woodthrush/ the book is a thousand pages without commas." Unfortunately, only in this atypical piece are emotion and memory subjected to poetic transformation.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 134 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin; First Edition edition (June 20, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395788412
• ISBN-13: 978-0395788417
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,806,448 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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