Donald Hall
Personal Information
Description
Donald Andrew Hall Jr. (September 20, 1928 – June 23, 2018) was an American poet, writer, editor and literary critic. He was the author of over 50 books across several genres from children's literature, biography, memoir, essays, and including 22 volumes of verse. Hall was a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard, and Oxford. Early in his career, he became the first poetry editor of The Paris Review (1953–1961), the quarterly literary journal, and was noted for interviewing poets and other authors on their craft. On June 14, 2006, Hall was appointed as the Library of Congress's 14th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry (commonly known as "Poet Laureate of the United States"). He is regarded as a "plainspoken, rural poet," and it has been said that, in his work, he "explores the longing for a more bucolic past and reflects [an] abiding reverence for nature." Hall was respected for his work as an academic, having taught at Stanford University, Bennington College and the University of Michigan, and having made significant contributions to the study and craft of writing.
Books
Unpacking the Boxes
Donald Hall's remarkable life in poetry -- a career capped by his appointment as U.S. poet laureate in 2006 -- comes alive in this richly detailed, self-revealing memoir.
White Apples and the Taste of Stone
Spanning the entire career of the celebrated American poet, a collection of 226 works represents sixty years of poetic endeavor, including recent poems and a CD containing readings by the author.
The Best Day the Worst Day
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.
When Willard Met Babe Ruth
A boy meets the young Babe Ruth and along with his family follows the Babe's long and illustrious career.
Oxford Illustrated Book of American Children's Poems
An anthology of American poems, arranged chronologically, from colonial alphabet rhymes to Native American cradle songs to contemporary poems.
Lucy's Christmas
In the fall of 1909, Lucy gets an early start on making Christmas presents for her family and friends, which they will open at the church's Christmas program.
Lucy's Summer
For Lucy Wells, who lives on a farm in New Hampshire, the summer of 1910 is filled with helping her mother can fruits and vegetables, enjoying the Fourth of July celebration, and other activities.
The milkman's boy
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.
Old Life
For nearly forty years, through changes in fashion and form, Donald Hall has stood in the front rank of American poets. In his twelfth book of poems, The Old Life, the title poem is a long autobiographical sequence. It is preceded by two substantial poems: "The Night of the Day," which makes a thematic connection with his Old and New Poems (1990), and "The Thirteenth Inning," which bridges the gap between this book and his remarkable 1993 collection, The Museum of Clear Ideas. The book concludes with a heartbreaking lyric, "Without," commemorating the illness of his adored wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995.
Principal Products of Portugal
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."
New voices
The Man Who Lived Alone
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.
I am the dog, I am the cat
A dog and a cat take turns explaining what is wonderful about being who they are.