Kicking the Leaves: Poems by Donald Hall 1978

Donald Hall who died in 2018 a few months short of his 90th birthday is my favorite American poet and this, his sixth book of poetry, is my favorite volume.

My wife and I first met Hall in 1971 when I invited him to be the speaker at the annual U. of Michigan Medical School honorary society dinner.  The usual speakers in the past had been surgeons, cardiologists, etc, but I wanted a poet.  Eating dinner with him and listening to his remarks began a relationship and a pen-pal correspondence that stretched over nearly 50 years.  I would write about the Red Sox, my reading, other poets, his books, Vermont, and he would write back, always within 2-3 days with a typed note on Eagle Pond stationary which he had edited with words, cross-outs, punctuation, etc in black ink.  I treasured those notes and the occasional personal contacts at his book readings in Cambridge or in New Hampshire.  A major life-regret is that we never took him up on his invitation to visit him at his farm on Eagle Pond. I love his books about his NH grandparents, their farm on Eagle Pond, his life there with the poet Jane Kenyon as well as his children’s books, essays, and occasional magazine pieces.  Miss him.

I re-read this book nearly every Fall.  It takes me back to Ann Arbor and to his NH farm with its stone walls, pastures filled with sheep (“Ruminant pillows. Gregarious soft boulders!“), horses who pulled hay wagons and manure spreaders (“O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.”), and Mt. Kearsarge.  The eponymous poem is deeply personal describing Hall’s renewed ability to write poems after emerging from an alcoholic divorce and depression, his return to the beauty of the seasons, his love for his maturing children, and the awareness of his own mortality (“Now I leap and fall, exultant, recovering/from death, on account of death, in accord with the dead,/the smell and taste of leaves again,/and the pleasure, the only long pleasure, of taking a place/in the story of leaves.”)

I don’t love every poem in this book, but I dearly love most of them.  I lost a pen-pal friend and the world lost a wonderful poet when Hall died, but one can still live in  his work and this book is a fine place to start if you haven’t already.