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White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006

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How pathetic is this? I was the kid who liked poetry in school and memorized poems that weren't even assigned. I have a large poetry collection. I regularly steal lines from poets. And yet I never paid close attention to Donald Hall until recently, when he was named Poet Laureate. So the other day, as an act of penance as much as curiosity, I settled myself on the couch with the best poems he's written in a career that has seen him publish for every year I've been alive.

What a ride I took. What a ride awaits you. What a great thing has happened to make Hall visible to the multitudes while he is still among us.

It is easy to say that Hall is the successor to Robert Frost. His family had a farm in New Hampshire, he met Frost when he was young and impressionable, and many of his poems are set in the world of farmers --- gruff men, in a harsh landscape. Theirs is a hard life, but then, Hall seems to say, in poem after poem, so is all life.

"Like an old man," he writes, "whatever I touch I turn/to the story of death." And, again, "Birth is the fear of death." At that point, I reached for a pencil; I could see that Hall's lines have the quotable appeal of smart, direct speech --- the speech of a crusty, independent thinker. Like this: "In America, the past exists/in the library."

The past and the process of aging are Hall's continuing subjects, and he's anything but "poetic" in the way he deals with them. Here's "The Young Watch Us," an early poem:

The young girls look up
as we walk past the line at the movie,
and go back to examining their fingernails.

Their boyfriends are combing their hair,
and chew gum
as if they meant to insult us.

Today we made love all day.
I look at you. You are smiling on the sidewalk,
dear wrinkled face.

So much for the expected conclusion: envy of the young. But surprise is what you get time after time in these poems. When men on airplanes ask Hall, "What are you in?" he replies that he's "in" poetry and goes on to tell us about the lunchtime reading he gives to their wives at the "Women's Goodness Club." After, he goes to his motel room, watches 'Godzilla Sucks Mount Fuji' and thinks of the children of those men and women: "Will you ever be old and dumb, like your creepy parents? Not you, not you, not you, not you, not you, not you."

The surprise, of course, is that these poems go down like thin white wine --- you know, those German wines that are easy to drink as water but pack a kick you don't expect. This is a man who reads the obituaries in the Boston Globe "for the mean age." And there he spots a squib about Emily Farr, dead after a long illness in Oregon. He writes:

Once in an old house we talked for an hour, while a coal fire
brightened in November twilight and wavered
our shadows high on the wall
until our eyes fixed on each other. Thirty years ago.

Those last three words are, for me, breathtaking. But then, I'm not a kid, reading poetry for clues about what's next. I too can remember women from three decades ago, and the impression I had of them, and the choices we made. Some of them are now gone. And, reading those lines, of course I wonder.

The death of loved ones is a subject that, unknown to Hall, will become the singular subject of his most famous poems. In l972, while teaching at the University of Michigan, he married Jane Kenyon, one of his students, 19 years his junior, A few years later, he quit teaching and they moved to his family's farm in New Hampshire. He endured her depressions, adored her mind and libido --- they were a great match. In 1989, Hall was diagnosed with colon cancer, which metastasized to his liver. Although he went into remission, he had no illusions that he would live long.

So it was a terrible shock to learn, in 1994, that Jane had leukemia. Fifteen months later, she died. She was just 47.

Hall wrote a memoir, The Best Day The Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon, which friends describe as a love story that rips your heart out. I believe it --- I rocked, weeping, on the couch for hours as I read the poems that tell this same story. Oh, there is great humor in this book, especially a long poem about runaway heifers that keep Hall from watching Monday Night Football. Pretty much the whole neighborhood gathers to chat and speculate. One farmer jokes that Hall should keep them: "Feed them poems. They tell/you've got extra. They tell you keep bales/of poems stacked in the hayloft." And there are 75 pages of baseball-related poems. But don't be sidetracked --- the book is leading up to Jane, and her illness, and his astonishment that she will die first.

These poems are intimate in the way of an hour-by-hour journal. Donald and Jane revise her obituary and her poems together ("Wasn't that fun?" she says. "To work together? Wasn't that fun?"), they choose her final dress together, they live "in a small island stone nation" together. And then she dies.

Hall writes a haiku:

You think that their
dying is the worst
thing that could happen.

Then they stay dead.

He writes of his fumbling assignations with new women: "Lust is grief/that has turned over in bed/to look the other way." And, finally, he writes of accepting the deal that is life: "It is fitting/and delicious to lose everything."

I cannot think of better poems for somebody who has lost a loved one, is in the process, or can see around the bend to the place on the road where the Reaper awaits us.

In an earlier poem, Hall defines what life demands in another way: "Work, love, build a house, and die. But build a house." Has he ever. Has he ever.

Hall has been a poet for six decades, a dedicated craftsmen whose poetry turned more personal and autobiographical in the latter years. His most notable recent poems have had to do with his mourning for his wife, the poet Joan Kenyon. But the element of elegy and loss of friends has been a main theme of his poetry for many years. Wikipedia writes of him, " His recurring themes include New England rural living, baseball, and how work conveys meaning to ordinary life. He is regarded as a master both of poetic forms and free verse, and a champion of the art of revision, for whom writing is first and foremost a craft, not merely a mode of self-expression."

One of the most well- known of his poems for his wife is called
'Distressed Haiku' Another of the elegaic poems is the title poem of this collection in which he writes of the loss of his father.
His poetry has often a sharp ironic note. There is a clear, hard feeling in it.
There is something wonderfully special about a volume of collected poems, giving the reader as it does a chance to feel and sense the liftetime struggle and accomplishment of the poet .This is especially so when as in Hall's case the poems of the end of the life are among the most moving of all.

I feel somewhat embarrassed to say that Donald Hall was not a poet I was familiar with until just recently. And what a great thing I have been missing. I realized that Donald Hall was in a very old anthology I have from 1963 called "The Modern Poets." There is a jaunty photo of him smoking a cigar. The Bio does not mention his wife Jane Kenyon.

What a powerful effect these poems had on me. The come alive in a way I cannot accurately describe. They bring me closer to things I seem to remember, and with simplicity and depth, deliver the earth to my feet. Don't take my word for it. Take a look into this world for yourself.

Donald Hall, past Poet Laureate of the United States, has had a long and fruitful career. This compilation is well done - hardcover, good paper, clean printing and attractive typeface, and includes Hall's best work. His poems can make you laugh, or sigh, or weep. This is a "must have" for anyone who loves and values poetry.

Donald Hall's newest selected poems contains the distillation of sixty years worth of work in the fields of poetry. If the selection is not uniformly excellent, it displays a consistent ability to work well within a variety of poetic forms and styles and contains enough top-shelf poems to make any reader rejoice. If you've never read the work of our newest poet laureate to-be, this volume makes an excellent introduction.

To add to the ranks of the surprised ones... It was boringly browsing the other day through my landlady's bookshelves, and I found an intriguing volume of prose called "Seasons at Eagle Pond" by a name that rang a bell but didn't quite make it to my conscience... This was only a few weeks ago. I began an incessant search for Donald Hall's poems within my collection of anthologies, local libraries and the Internet. Then I purchased "White Apples and the Taste of Stone" and my embarrassment for not knowing Hall previously only yields now to the pleasure and comfort of having, at last, come across him. These are human poems; they speak to you and befriend you; later they may haunt you... Among them you will find pieces that are witty, fast, meditative, funny, horrific, mad and yes, very very sad. This collection exudes the world and vision of a keen observer of life. It will leave a reek of charged life around you! Simply great.

There is a little something
Here for everyone
Who's palate tastes so much
That it no longer can.
A poem that begins where it ends.
A line that whines and complains.
Some with a little too much
poetic license than I care for.
But mostly the yearning of an old man.

William Sowka (2006) A fellow Connecticut Yankee.

Having met Donald Hall and reading his poems, I am convinced he is a modern day Robert Frost. If you love poetry read this book. If you love New England read this book. If you truly love life as Mr.Hall does, read this book!

Even a baseball fan , such as myself will love this collection of Poems. I knew Donald Hall from his baseball writings and love of the game. Now as U.S. poet laureate, I had to see more of hime as evidenced by this book. Not a one night read, but a pleasure to pick up and dwell on and savor slowly.
Ernie Grassey

I've never been much for modern poetry. Gave this a try and often like the author's works, though it would be nice to read 2 poems in a row not about, in part at least, writer's block, the creative process, the importance of poetry, etcetera. Apparently his wife was a famous poet. I've read a few of hers and found them unspeakably terrible. Also horrifying beyond belief are all of the later poems I've tried in here, including, sadly, some rambly ones ostensibly about baseball (and writer's block). He writes short stories often, with good characters, and bare emotion, all done with economy of expression and so forth- those are perhaps his best. Hey, nobody has all good poems. Anyone who tried to would have no poems at all. I'd say it is worth a try, though the only guarantee I offer is that you will get a little nostalgic for farm life and seasons, harvesting, canning, forests, and the like.