Most Popular Books by Donald Hall

“With The One Day, this is his best work, a modest, skeptical, and brave poetry that embodies something essential about this late American century.” —Harvard Review This is Donald Hall’s most advanced work, extending his poetic reach even beyond his recent volumes. Conflict dominates this book, and conflict unites it. Hall takes poetry as an instrument for revelation, whether in an elegy for a (fictional) contemporary poet, or in the title series of poems, whose form imitates the first book of the Odes of Horace. The book’s final section, “Extra Innings,” moves with poignancy to questions about the end of the game. “A stunning volume of testamentary verse . . . an often perfect American blend of rue and buoyancy, narrative verve and grace.” —The New Yorker “Donald Hall is our finest elegist. The Museum of Clear Ideas is as original, idiosyncratic, and un-museumlike a poetic work as we are likely to see for a long time to come.” —Richard Tillinghast, The New Criterion “Hall’s poems make ‘durable relics’ of late twentieth-century life in much the same way that Byron’s Don Juan does for the early nineteenth. The ‘clear ideas,’ however, are timeless.” —Beloit Poetry Journal “These are some of the darkest lines Donald Hall has ever composed. They move through aching poignancy through illness diagnosed, sorrow, and poignant revelation, yet the final chord is not one of despair.” —Robert Taylor, Boston Globe “A collection of powerful new poems . . . Hall’s voice is more mature and classically spare than ever, offering revelatory glimpses of wisdom.” —Publishers Weekly “A brilliantly inventive tour de force . . . A significant and engaging book.” —Library Journal

Hall''s bestselling collection ever speaks of the death of his wife--his gift and testimony, his lament, and his celebration of loss and love.

Winner of the Caldecott Medal Thus begins a lyrical journey through the days and weeks, the months, and the changing seasons in the life of one New Englander and his family. The oxcart man packs his goods - the wool from his sheep, the shawl his wife made, the mittens his daughter knitted, and the linen they wove. He packs the birch brooms his son carved, and even a bag of goose feathers from the barnyard geese. He travels over hills, through valleys, by streams, past farms and villages. At Portsmouth Market he sells his goods, one by one - even his beloved ox. Then, with his pockets full of coins, he wanders through the market, buying provisions for his family, and returns to his home. And the cycle begins again. "Like a pastoral symphony translated into picture book format, the stunning combination of text and illustrations recreates the mood of 19-century rural New England."—The Horn Book

The former U.S. poet laureate presents the essential work from across his long and celebrated career in this sweeping collection. For decades, Donald Hall produced a body of work that established him as one of America’s most significant—and beloved—poets of his generation. Celebrated for his plainspoken yet evocative imagery and his stirring explorations of bucolic life, Hall won numerous awards, including the Robert Frost Medal, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the National Medal of Arts. When Hall reached his eighties, his health began to decline, and he announced that the ability to write poems has “abandoned” him. Looking back over his astonishingly rich body of work, Hall hand-picked his finest and most memorable poems for this final, concise, and essential volume.

Twelfth book by the American author, featuring the autobiographical title work; a memorial to his wife, poet Jane Kenyon who died in 1995; and two other poems with thematic connections to his earlier works.

A compelling collection of essays on the state of contemporary poetry

The former US poet laureate delivers a book “filled with raw sexual disclosures, rowdy anger and a self-blasting mockery” (The New York Times). Donald Hall’s fourteenth collection opens with an epigraph from the Urdu poet Faiz: “The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved.” In that poetic tradition, as in The Painted Bed, the beloved might be a person or something else—life itself, or the disappearing countryside. Hall’s new poems further the themes of love, death, and mourning so powerfully introduced in his Without (1998), but from the distance of passed time. A long poem, “Daylilies on the Hill 1975-1989,” moves back to the happy repossession of the poet’s old family house and its history—a structure that “persisted against assaults” as its generations of residents could not. These poems are by turns furious and resigned, spirited and despairing—”mania is melancholy reversed,” as Hall writes in another long poem, “Kill the Day.” In this book’s fourth and final section, “Ardor,” the poet moves toward acceptance of new life in old age; eros reemerges. “More controlled, more varied and more powerful, this taut follow-up volume [to Without] reexamines Hall’s grief while exploring the life he has made since. The book’s first poem, ‘Kill the Day,’ stands among the best Hall has ever written.” —Publishers Weekly “A compelling, sometimes shocking, and certainly deeply moving depiction of bereavement.” —Poetry “Hall has continued growing as a poet, and his steady readers may consider this his finest collection . . . Bleakness and beauty characterize the reminiscent lyrics that follow, too, joined by a breathtaking bluntness.” —Booklist

This collection drawn from more than forty years of the poet’s work is “a superb introduction to newcomers and a sumptuous offering to familiars” (Publishers Weekly). Former US Poet Laureate Donald Hall has been celebrated with numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Medal of the Arts. This volume collects some of Hall’s finest short poetry written between 1947 and 1990. Here are poems of landscape and love, of dedication and prophecy. “Our delight is in following an exceptional poet''s growth and depth as he emerges with a richly playful but consummately serious voice.” —Publishers Weekly

Tells the story of the Graves Family Dairy, whose three horses pulled the wagons delivering milk to families in the years before trucks and shopping centers replaced them.

The revered American Poet Laureate reflects on the meaning of work, solitude, and love with “extraordinary nobility and wisdom” (The New York Times) When Donald Hall moved to his grandparents’ New Hampshire farm in 1975, his work as a writer and a life devoted to the literary arts must have seemed remote from the harsh physical labor of his ancestors. However, he reveals a similar kind of artistry in the lives of his grandparents, Kate and Wesley. From them, he learned that the devotion to craft—be it canning vegetables, writing poems, or carting manure—creates its own special discipline and an ‘absorbedness’ that no wage can compensate. In this “sustained meditation on work as the key to personal happiness” (Los Angeles Times), we see how the writer has modeled his own life on his family’s lives of work, solitude, and love. When Hall comes face to face with his own mortality halfway through writing this book, we understand both his obsession with work and its ultimate consolation.

The first full-length volume of poems in a decade by the former poet laureate of the United States In The Back Chamber, Donald Hall illuminates the evocative, iconic objects of deep memory—a cowbell, a white stone perfectly round, a three-legged milking stool—that serve to foreground the rich meditations on time and mortality that run through his remarkable new collection. While Hall’s devoted readers will recognize many of his long-standing preoccupations—baseball, the family farm, love, sex, and friendship—what will strike them as new is the fierce, pitiless poignancy he reveals as his own life’s end comes into view. The Back Chamber is far from being death-haunted, but rather is lively, irreverent, erotic, hilarious, ironic, and sly—full of the life-affirming energy that has made Donald Hall one of America’s most popular and enduring poets.

Former United States poet laureate Donald Hall reflects on his life, discussing his childhood in Connecticut, the works that influenced him, his education, his success and failures as a writer and father, his friendships, and other related topics.

If we believe that the most engaging people have eclectic interests, then Donald Hall is incontrovertibly our most engaging man of letters. Prize-winning poet, teacher, essayist, children''s book writer, Hall here reflects on some of the things he holds most dear: his family home at New Hampshire''s Eagle Pond, baseball, poetry, artists and writers named Henry (Moore, Adams, and James), trees, politics, graveyards, basketball, and reading out loud. Collected here for the first time are Hall''s reminiscences of time spent with the sculptor Henry Moore, appreciations of his sports heroes such as Bob Cousy, Red Auerbach, Carlton Fisk, and his insightful and inspiring readings of fellow poets, E. A. Robinson, Andrew Marvell, James Wright, and others. This undeniably eclectic mix is a celebration and catalog of a writer''s subjects. In Hall''s words, "The title should please not only for its prodigious procession of p''s but for bringing back memories of rote recitation standing in the third grade doing the multiplication tables, 7''s maybe, or maybe the principal products of Portugal." Hall''s dedication to the written word will be familiar to readers of his poetry and his autobiographical essay Life Work, a "sustained meditation on work as the key to personal happiness," according to the Los Angeles Times. Principal Products of Portugal gives Hall''s readers a fresh perspective on familiar subjects as well as a deeper appreciation for the making of a reader, writer, and poet.

Co-authored by two esteemed writers, "Writing Well," is a beautifully-written and thoroughly readable guide to the craft of writing prose. This concise, lively text covers all aspects of writing but is best known for its signature chapters on words, sentences, and paragraphs. Going beyond the basics of composition, the text teaches originality and elegance in writing encouraging students to develop their own written voice. Sample student papers including several works-in-progress - allow students to learn the writing process through the work of their peers. A brief handbook section rounds out the coverage.

This retrospective collection of verse from the former US poet laureate and National Medal of Arts winner spans six decades of celebrated work. Throughout his writing life Donald Hall has garnered numerous accolades and honors, culminating in 2006 with his appointment as poet laureate of the United States. White Apples and the Taste of Stone collects more than two hundred poems from across sixty years of Hall’s celebrated career, and includes poems published in The New Yorker, the American Poetry Review, and the New York Times. Those who have come to love Donald Hall''s poetry will welcome this vital and important addition to his body of work. For the uninitiated it is a spectacular introduction to this critically acclaimed and admired poet.

The former U.S. Poet Laureate contemplates life, death, and the view from his window in these “alternately lyrical and laugh-out-loud funny” essays (The New York Times). From an early age, Donald Hall dedicated his life to the written word. In his long and celebrated career, he was an accomplished poet, essayist, memoirist, dramatist, and children’s author. Now, in the “unknown, unanticipated galaxy” of very old age, his essays continue to startle, move, and delight. In Essays After Eighty, Hall ruminates on his past: “thirty was terrifying, forty I never noticed because I was drunk, fifty was best with a total change of life, sixty extended the bliss of fifty . . .” He also addresses his present: “When I turned eighty and rubbed testosterone on my chest, my beard roared like a lion and gained four inches.” Most memorably, Hall writes about his enduring love affair with his ancestral Eagle Pond Farm and with the writing life that sustains him every day: “Yesterday my first nap was at 9:30 a.m., but when I awoke I wrote again.” “Deliciously readable…Donald Hall, if abandoned by the muse of poetry, has wrought his prose to a keen autumnal edge.” —The Wall Street Journal

A contemplative selection of twelve short stories from the celebrated author Donald Hall, Willow Temple focuses on the effects of divorce, adultery, and neglect. Hall''s stories are reminiscent of those of Alice Munro and William Maxwell in their mastery of form and their ability to trace the emotional fault lines connecting generations. "From Willow Temple" is the indelible story of a child''s witness of her mother''s adultery and the loss that underlies it. Three stories present David Bardo at crucial junctures of his life, beginning as a child drawn to his parents'' "cozy adult coven of drunks" and growing into a young man whose intense first affair undergirds a lifelong taste for ardor and betrayal. In this superbly perceptive collection, Hall gives memorable accounts of the passionate weight of lives.

This is a collection of stories diverse in subject, but sutured together by the limitless affection the author holds for the land and the people of New England. Donald Hall tells about life on a small farm where, as a boy, he spent summers with his grandparents. Gradually the boy grows to be a young man, sees his grandparents aging, the farm become marginal, and finally, the cows sold and the barn abandoned. But these are more than nostalgic memories, for in the measured and tender prose of each episode are signs of the end of things - a childhood, perhaps a culture. In an Epilogue written for this edition, Donald Hall describes his return to the farm twenty-five years later, to live the rest of his life in the house of string. We take pleasure in bringing back into print this classic account of boyhood summers in old New England, with the addition of an Epilogue and an album of family snapshots.

A man who had been unhappy as a child finds after he has grown up that he is happy living alone in his cabin in the New England woods.

In the pantheon of great sports literature, not a few poets have tried their hand at paying tribute to their love affair with the game -- Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams among them. This elegant volume collects Donald Hall''s prose about sports, concentrating on baseball but extending to basketball, football and Ping-Pong. The essays are a wonderful mixture of reminiscence and observation, of baseball and of fathers and sons, of how a game binds people together and bridges generations.

This collection brings together for the first time all of Hall''s writing on Eagle Pond Farm, his ancestral home in New Hampshire. It includes "Seasons at Eagle Pond" and "Here at Eagle Pond," the poem RDaylilies on the Hill, S and other essays.

From the Publisher: Donald Hall''s celebrated book of poems Without was written for his wife, Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995. Hall returns to this powerful territory in The Best Day the Worst Day, a work of prose that is equally "a work of art, love, and generous genius" (Liz Rosenberg, Boston Globe). Jane Kenyon was nineteen years younger than Donald Hall and a student poet at the University of Michigan when they met. Hall was her teacher. The Best Day the Worst Day is an intimate account of their twenty-three-year marriage; nearly all of it spent in New Hampshire at Eagle Pond Farm-of their shared rituals of writing, close attention to pets and gardening, and love in the afternoon. Hall joyfully records Jane''s growing power as a poet and the couple''s careful accommodations toward each other as writers. This portrait of the inner moods of "the best marriage I know about," as Hall has written, is laid against the stark medical emergency of Jane''s leukemia, which ended her life in fifteen months. Hall shares with readers-as if we were one of the grieving neighbors, friends, and relatives-the daily ordeal of Jane''s dying, through heartbreaking and generous storytelling. The Best Day the Worst Day stands alongside Elegy to Iris as a powerful testimony to both loss and love.

Distinguished poet Donald Hall and award-winning artist Barry Moser have teamed up to create a hilarious, affectionate portrait in contrasts of our companions, and often best friends, a cat and a dog. With evocative words and masterful paintings, they delineate the doginess and catlike qualities that everyone will recognize.

This book introduces the three principal types or genres of literature: fiction, poetry, and drama in a way that helps students read literature with pleasure, intelligence, and discrimination.

In a long poem, the narrator looks back on his childhood and shares his attitudes toward the past

A master of American letters collects forty years of writings on poetry in one essential volume

Beginning in 1983, Donald Hall and his late wife, poet Jane Kenyon, sent Christmas cards with one of Donald''s poems (one year with a poem by Jane). The cards were illustrated by various artists and printed on a letterpress by New Hampshire publisher and printer Bill Ewert. These poems have been gathered in Winter Poems from Eagle Pond, together with a short introduction by Hall and two woodblock prints by artist Barry Moser. --Donald Hall.