The Painted Bed: Poems [Paperback]

Donald Hall (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 7, 2003

Affirmation

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage, that began without harm, scatters into debris on the shore, and a friend from school drops cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us past middle age, our wife will die at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces that she is temporary is temporary. The bold woman, middle-aged against our old age, sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond’s edge and affirm that it is fitting and delicious to lose everything.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Hall has for decades been an eminent poet and critic; his previous book, Without (1999), was a raw collection of elegies for his late wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, that brought attention to their lives and work. More controlled, more varied and more powerful, this taut follow-up volume 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. It examines mourning in 16 long-lined stanzas, alternating catalogue with aphorism, understatement with keened lament: "How many times will he die in his own lifetime?" Two groups of terse, short-lined free verse proffer stories and moments from Kenyon's last days and from Hall's first days without her: "You think that their dying is the worst thing that could happen. Then they stay dead." Subsequent brief stanzaic lyrics take both epigraph and method from Thomas Hardy's poems on the loss of his wife: some will please both Hardy's fans and Hall's. But even those fans may skip "Daylilies on the Hill," a lengthy and overly detailed verse history of the by now familiar New Hampshire house that Hall and Kenyon shared. The book's last poems range from raunchy to wise as they explore sex in later age "Sometimes our red fitted sheets maneuvered to embrace us like pythons." The final poem, ironically called "Affirmation," contains a more typical and typically stark prediction: "If a new love carries us past middle age, our wife will die at her strongest and most beautiful." (Apr.)Forecast: The press blitz that accompanied Without won't materialize here, but it won't matter to Hall's (and Kenyon's) many readers. Look for broader reviews centered on the poetry of illness and grief that could include this book, Alan Shapiro's Song & Dance (Forecasts, Dec. 17, 2001), Linda Pastan's The Last Uncle (Forecasts, Jan. 21) and Donald Revell's Arcady (reviewed below).

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Even as he has suffered from his wife Jane Kenyon's death and the declining powers of age, Hall has continued growing as a poet, and his steady readers may consider this his finest collection. The long, long-lined opening poem, "Kill the Day," considers his grief over Jane from a few years later than the raw, bleeding poems of Without (1998), and reports a bleak existence but limns it with compelling beauty. Bleakness and beauty characterize the reminiscent lyrics that follow, too, joined by a breathtaking bluntness, as in this "Distressed Haiku": "You think that their / dying is the worst / thing that could happen. // Then they stay dead." A second long-lined, long poem, "Daylilies on the Hill 1975-1989," however, celebrates his grandparents' old house, which he restored to be his home, and some humbly momentous events in its history. The love that breaks through in "Daylilies" skittishly informs the bawdy poems that lead to the final "Affirmation" that "it is fitting / and delicious to lose everything." Amen. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (May 7, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618340750
• ISBN-13: 978-0618340750
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #171,819 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cannot wait to read the entire collection, April 10, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Painted Bed: Poems (Hardcover)

I heard the author interviewed on Fresh Air today and was enthralled by the reading of his poetry. I lost my mom to cancer three years ago and want to buy this collection not only for myself but also for my dad, who has gone through many of the same stages of grief and mourning as the author. Now that my dad is coming out on the other side -- and learning to live fully again, but always with the memories of my mom not far away -- I think he might appreciate this honest voice that explores emotion, loss, and self. If the poems Hall read on Fresh Air are any indication, the rest of this collection will be quite moving and memorable.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Magnificent, April 26, 2003

By 

Donald A. Newlove (Greenwich Village) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Painted Bed: Poems (Paperback)

Heartbreak recollected in sublimity. The long "Daylilies" poem tells of the loss of the poet's family members over two centuries in his New Hampshire farmhouse. Walls, beams, lathe, handmade nails, everything about the house goes into a sense of infinite loss over the centuries and parallels the loss of his wife. We all go into the night, but it's great to go in the hands of a poet like Hall.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poems that humanize, April 29, 2002

By 

dylanissimus "dylanissimus" (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Painted Bed: Poems (Hardcover)

Hall's verse not only vivifies the one he mourns for, but also awakens and afflicts the reader with a sympathetic alertness; moreover, the stanzas of the poems, both rhymed and un-, represent his best writing in verse since the days of "The One Day." Perhaps such evaluations are an impertinence as we ponder poems born of such grief; nonetheless, Hall deserves praise for his esthetic accomplishment and his intimately human voice. The language does not falter.

If the price of a hardcover book proves prohibitive, one might fly to the nearest bookstore, pluck "The Painted Bed" from the shelves, and sit on a chair or a patch of carpet and receive these words as one might receive the language of a liturgy. The stations of Hall's grief are composed of stately phrases and living words. Few books of poetry can be described with justice as necessary to acquire and to absorb; Hall's collection of elegies is such a book -- vital in the sense of necessary, and in the sense of helping one to live.