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

by Donald Hall (Author) "Old man remembers to old man..." (more)
Key Phrases: praise death, painted bed, white apples, New Hampshire, Eagle Pond, Ragged Mountain (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Hall's 60 years of much-honored work have made him an elder statesman among American poets and a much-honored exponent of the clear, plain style: this career retrospective (the first since 1990) finds room for all his strengths. Given to formal short work in the '50s, to lengthy verse essays and verse memoirs later on, Hall shows consistent topics and moods: adult life among New Hampshire's farms and mountains, childhood in the Connecticut suburbs, equanimity and nostalgia, satire and self-satire, middle age and old age, regret and reserve. Most original in his long poems from the '80s and '90s, Hall achieved popular success in recent years, in Without (1998) and The Painted Bed (2002), collecting elegies and laments for his late wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, whose life he chronicled in the prose memoir The Best Day the Worst Day (2005). In a month overcrowded with poetry releases, Hall's long-eminent reputation, and the persistent interest in Kenyon, should combine to help this book stand out. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Since 1995, Donald Hall has been so closely associated with the untimely passing of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, that his long life's work in poetry, arcing over six decades, may be said to have become partially eclipsed by the shadow of her death. His tributes to her in Without (1998) and The Painted Bed (2002) created for Hall a reputation as a primarily elegiac poet. But Hall, as his loyal readers know, is that and more.

The publication of 226 selected poems in White Apples and the Taste of Stone comes, then, as a welcome and needed reminder of the expansiveness and weight of this poet's output. It is also an opportunity to enjoy the delightful variety of his work and the sheer charm of his voice. This hefty book, accompanied by a CD of Hall reading some of his work, is a physical and literary manifestation of his importance, not only as an authority on grief but as a major figure in the canon of contemporary American poetry.

Hall has long been placed in the Frostian tradition of the plainspoken rural poet. His reliance on simple, concrete diction and the no-nonsense sequence of the declarative sentence gives his poems steadiness and imbues them with a tone of sincere authority. It is a kind of simplicity that succeeds in engaging the reader in the first few lines. "In October of the year," one poem begins, "he counts potatoes dug from the brown field." Another opens: "Looking through boxes/ in the attic of my mother's house in Hamden,/ I find a model airplane." Many poems are further stabilized by Hall's love of storytelling, a narrative exuberance that produces anecdotal poems as well as longer, more complex weavings.

Hall himself may be as sophisticated as any American poet (he studied at Harvard, Oxford and Stanford and taught at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor), but his persona is agrarian. His decision to detach himself from academic life, with its slow but steady intravenous drip of a salary, and retire to a family farmhouse in New Hampshire gives him the barnyard credibility to write about the lives of farmers and their animals alike. Pig, hen, horse, sheep and cow -- all are subjects of sympathetic meditations on the animals whose lives are taken to sustain ours. "Eating the Pig" should be required reading for all literate carnivores.

In Hall's poetry, as in reality, the dead outnumber the living. The mood of loss that attends the passing of generations saturates this collection. In "Traffic," the poet returns to Earth after having "wandered a lifetime among galaxies" to find "the people gone, ruin taking their place. . . . Freddie Bauer is dead. . . . Agnes McSparren is dead. . . . Harry Bailey is dead. . . . Karl Kapp is dead,/ who loaded his van at dawn,/ conveyor belt supplying butter, cottage cheese, heavy cream." In hindsight, it almost seems that Hall's longstanding elegiac preoccupations served as a kind of preparation for the loss of Jane Kenyon, whose protracted illness and death are assiduously and tenderly chronicled in poem after poem.

Death has long been poetry's favorite lens, but this collection also demonstrates Hall's versatility in form and subject and his ability to advance happily in a number of poetic and tonal gears. Witness the comic apostrophes of "O Cheese" ("O village of cheeses, I make you this poem of cheeses"); the noble formality of "Names of Horses"; the grim celebration of "Praise for Death"; the whimsicality of "On Reaching the Age of Two Hundred" ("It was the usual thing:/ dried grapefruit for breakfast"); or the imaginative bravado of "The Impossible Marriage," which enacts the fiasco of the wedding of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.

Hall must also be credited with the distinction of being America's best baseball poet. In this collection, each of the nine innings gets its own poem -- composed of nine nine-line stanzas -- and for those who want more balls and strikes, the poetic game stretches into four extra innings as the poet continues to stitch his sports metaphor into the fabric of his life. "Baseball is not my work. It is my/ walk in the park, my pint of bitter" is an interesting declaration coming from a poet well-known for locating happiness in work.

One quibble for the more scholarly reader is that the poems are not listed by date or grouped by their books of origin; rather, though chronological, they are creatively but unhelpfully presented in sections bearing their own sometimes puzzling titles.

Still, White Apples and the Taste of Stone offers the most generous array of this poet's work to date, plus a bonus of almost 20 new poems. If you are interested enough in contemporary poetry to have read this review to the end, then the collected poems of Donald Hall should have a place on your night table and, later, on a shelf within easy reach.

Reviewed by Billy Collins
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin; First edition edition (April 3, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 061853721X
• ISBN-13: 978-0618537211
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #527,810 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #14 in

  Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( H ) > Hall, Donald

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

58 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The subject is life and death --- in smart, direct, quotable speech , June 27, 2006

By	Jesse Kornbluth "Head Butler" (New York) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The life so short, the craft so long to learn , June 18, 2006

By	Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

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.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beauty and Power, December 23, 2006

By	Driver9 (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

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.