Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry [Paperback]

Donald Hall (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 11, 2009

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This brisk and likable new memoir by the prolific and plainspoken former U.S. poet laureate Hall (White Apples and the Taste of Stone) covers the years before and after the period he and the late poet Jane Kenyon famously shared. After a childhood divided between his beloved rural New Hampshire and frustrating suburban Connecticut, he devoted himself in high school to poems, composing lines (Dead people don't like olives) at all hours. He felt out of place at a prestigious boarding school, but at home at 1940s Harvard, where he met Frank O'Hara, Edward Gorey, John Ashbery, and Robert Bly (who would become Hall's closest friend). Over a series of moves—back and forth between England and the U.S. (he considered Oxford University a party school), he finally left academia to live in New Hampshire with Jane Kenyon. He became a successful professional poet and a prolific freelance writer, meeting and working with George Plimpton and with the widow of the actor Charles Laughton, Eva La Gallienne. The memoir's last segment is by far its most affecting: the afflictions of grief and of old age—a stroke, trouble driving and walking, a scary manic episode—join up with the pleasure and ironies of late-life fame. (Sept.)
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From The New Yorker

Most memoirs begin with a birth, but Hall?s starts with another sort of becoming: At fourteen I decided to spend my life writing poetry, which is what I have done. Soon Hall moves from suburban Connecticut, where nothing happened, to Exeter, Harvard, and Oxford, his time line marked indelibly by books and illnesses. Halls direct tone softens the extraordinariness of his life. Frank OHara, John Ashbery, and Adrienne Rich are school chums; literary successes, such as his appointment as Poet Laureate, are presented without garnish. The final two chapters, which mourn Halls late wife, Jane Kenyon, and the fact of aging, are more emotionally wrought. Here, where the fleshy museum of memory is most acute, Hall affectingly navigates the tumult. In old age, his directness is part modesty and part wryness. When asked, at a Library of Congress dinner, the subject of his writing, he replies, Love, death, and New Hampshire.
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Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; Reprint edition (September 11, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 054724794X
• ISBN-13: 978-0547247946
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #773,470 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A moving memoir, September 14, 2008

By 

Isabel Lewis (Marshall, TX United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry (Hardcover)

I first discovered Donald Hall when teaching high school English. Hundreds of my students, through the years, read his classic "My Son My Executioner" in my class, and since first discovering that poem at an AP conference, I've read everything I can find that he's written. This memoir is a gentle, moving, ultimately rather heartbreaking book. I recommend it.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars "The weeds rise rank and thick", October 3, 2009

By 

R. M. Peterson (Santa Fe, NM) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry (Paperback)

One might be excused for thinking that Donald Hall, Poet Laureate of the United States in 2006-2007, has written as many memoirs as he has books of poetry. I may well be off by one or two (either way), but by my count UNPACKING THE BOXES is his seventh memoir. Years ago I read two of his earlier ones ("String Too Short To Be Saved" and "Life Work"), and they proved to be easy, moderately interesting and literate reads. UNPACKING THE BOXES can be described in the same way, but it doesn't quite measure up to those previous two. Maybe it has something to do with my own aging, rather than (or in addition to) Donald Hall's.

In any event, UNPACKING THE BOXES basically covers the stages of youth and old age of Donald Hall. The first three-quarters of this memoir cover his childhood in Hamden, Connecticut, schooling at Exeter, Harvard, and Oxford, and teaching at the University of Michigan. Throughout this discussion, Hall gives particular emphasis to his enthusiasm for poetry and his education and development as a poet. As a parenthetical, it is remarkable how many other distinguished poets were fellow students with Hall at Harvard circa 1950 -- for example, John Ashberry, Robert Bly, Kenneth Koch, and Adrienne Rich. At Michigan, Hall met Jane Kenyon (she was one of his students) and eventually she became his second wife. In other books, Hall has written about their 20+ years together, mostly in New Hampshire, and about her death from leukemia. The last quarter of UNPACKING THE BOXES deals with Hall's life after Jane's death, including three years of intense and debilitating grief and then Hall's own struggles with the decrepitudes of old age (he writes the book as an octogenarian).

Throughout, Hall seems to be forthright, even when the result does not reflect very favorably on him. At times, especially in the last quarter of the book when discussing his inner psychological turmoil brought on by the illness and death of Jane Kenyon, Hall's account becomes rather uncomfortable, and once again I encounter a writer who has relinquished drapes of personal privacy that I would never let drop. Does art really demand such baring of the soul or psyche?

UNPACKING THE BOXES should be of moderate interest to devotees of post-WWII American poetry, and perhaps of keen interest to fans of Donald Hall or Jane Kenyon. For the rest of us, it is, I fear, somewhat on the tepid side.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hall returns to his childhood, December 3, 2008

By 

Corinne H. Smith (Athol, MA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry (Hardcover)

When former U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall lost his mother in 1994, he packed up everything from her house and moved the boxes, unopened, to his own cottage. His wife, Jane Kenyon, died the following year; and Hall mourned his closest losses at length. Only the passage of time gave him the impetus to finally go back and "unpack the boxes." What he uncovered were the memories of his childhood and the stories of his parents' lives, jogged into the present by tokens, mementos, scraps, and photographs. He shares those remembered scenes with us on these pages.

This memoir, then, covers his early years in New Haven, Connecticut; his schooling at Exeter in New Hampshire; his undergraduate study at Harvard; and additional education in Europe. Always in the background is the lure of his grandparents' farm in New Hampshire, a sanctuary and a retreat from those other "civilized" experiences. We shouldn't be surprised that he eventually chooses to live there, later in life. Since Hall documented Jane's life and death in the book "The Best Day the Worst Day," he skips over most of those details here. He does delve into his resulting despondency. And then he gets the call in 2006 -- a fax, really -- that he's been named the Poet Laureate. He's excited, he accepts, and that's the end of this volume.

I saw Donald Hall in person at the live broadcast of "A Prairie Home Companion" at Tanglewood in June 2008. I knew little of him before that night, I'm afraid to say. But after finishing this book, I can't wait to read more. Now I'll have to catch up by going back to all of his previous books.