Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry, this serious, ambitious, and graceful book-length poem is the masterwork of one of America's foremost contemporary poets.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
The One Day is a long poem that weaves the voice of a male and a female together with classic texts in an examination of middle age and its accompanying crisis. The poem, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1988, has three parts--"Shrubs Burnt Away," "Four Classic Texts" and "To Build a House"--and uses a 10-line stanza with variable line length in an experimental form. The words often strike deep into the heart of mid-life anxiety; he calls the bed "a preparation of death." But The One Day isn't all despair, it is also about a life worth living: "Work, love, build a house, and die. But build a house."
From Publishers Weekly
In this three-part poem, composed of male and female narrative, as well as classic textsprophecy, pastoral, history and ecloguethe concept of middle age is explored with fresh insight and expressed in brilliant turns of phrase. Though at times esoteric because of its form and the intricacy and spontaneity of Hall's thought processes, the poem maintains a remarkable clarity and elegance of language as vivid, concrete details are interspersed with a stream of consciousness. The noted Hall uses three chilling metaphors to make sense of the conflicts inspired by human fallibility. He compares the universe to a bed: "The bed is a world of pain and the repeated deaths / of preparation for death. The awake nightmare / comforts itself by painting the mourner's portrait: / As I imagine myself on grief's rack at graveside / I picture and pity myself. When pathology supplies / the jargon of reassurance, I have buried your body / a thousand times. Gradually we recover pulse / to return to the bed's world and the third thing." He likens living one's life to building a house, and one day in a person's existence to an entire life; not impervious to psychic pain, Hall remains optimistic: "We are one cell perpetually / dying and being born, led by a single day that presides / over our passage through the thirty thousand days / from highchair past work and love to suffering death. / We plant; we store the seedcorn. Our sons and daughters / topdress old trees. Two chimneys require: / Work, love, build a house, and die. But build a house."
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stunning,
By A Customer
This review is from: The One Day (Paperback)
Hall takes a single thread, aging, and observes it from all angles, male, female, depression, esctasy, violence, anger and happiness. Man is compared with history, nature and Greek tragedy. But don't get put off by the grande themes, this is a very readeable and enjoyable book for anyone who likes to read.
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