Hall, who died at his family farm in Wilmot, New Hampshire five years ago, remains my favorite poet.  Eclipsing Robert Frost, Stanley Kunitz, Kay Ryan, Louise Gluck and many others, Hall is the poet whose work I most enjoy and most identify with.

As some of you may know, I met Donald Hall when he was an English professor and I was a medical student in Ann Arbor in 1970.  Given the responsibility to find an after dinner speaker for our annual AOA Honorary Society event, I forwent the usual Chairman of Surgery and invited a poet.  We became acquainted over dinner and thus began a nearly 50 year relationship mostly conducted via occasional letters about the weather, the Red Sox, reading, etc.

I’ve read nearly all of Hall’s extraordinary work from books of poems to his short stories, literary criticism, essays, and children’s books, and every one of them is worth the time.  I highy recommend this particular volume of poetry chosen by the author as he closed in on his 90th birthday.

The book has a wonderful Postscriptum in which Hall shares how he chose the poems:  “It’s strange yet a pleasure to pick and choose, going through the up and down story of my life.”  And the story of his life is what one gets as one reads the book—the story of a young boy growing up in Hamden, CT who loses his father at an early age, who spends summers with his grandparents on the NH mountain-side farm which their parents bought in the mid-19th C, who devotes his life to poetry, who divorces and nearly loses his way in depression and drink, who finds the love of his life and moves to that NH farmhouse where he and she write their poetry and live with deep love, who loses his young wife to cancer and who nearly dies of grief himself.  It’s all there in poems that are clear, concise, and beautiful.

Choosing a favorite or two to round out this review has proven to be difficult but here are two of my long time favorites.

a hill in Connecticut

The whole day long, under the walking sun
That poised an eye on me from its high floor,
Holding my toy beside the clapboard house
I looked for him, the summer I was four.

I was afraid the waking arm would break
From the loose earth and rub against his eyes
A fist of trees, and the whole country tremble
In the exultant labor of his rise;

Then he with giant steps in the small streets
Would stagger, cutting off the sky, to seize
The roofs from house and home because we had
Covered his shape with dirt and planted trees;

And then kneel down and rip with fingernails
A trench to pour the enemy Atlantic
Into our basin, and the water rush,
With the streets full and all the voices frantic.

That was the summer I expected him.
Later the high and watchful sun instead
Walked low behind the house, and school began,
And winter pulled a sheet over his head.

and Summer Kitchen:

Summer Kitchen

In June’s high light she stood at the sink
With a glass of wine,
And listened for the bobolink,
And crushed garlic in late sunshine.

I watched her cooking, from my chair.
She pressed her lips
Together, reached for kitchenware,
And tasted sauce from her fingertips.

“It’s ready now. Come on,” she said.
“You light the candle.”
We ate, and talked, and went to bed,
And slept. It was a miracle.