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.

--- by Jesse Kornbluth, for HeadButler.com

To buy "White Apples and the Taste of Stone" from Amazon.com, click here.

To buy "The Best Day The Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon" from Amazon.com, click here.

Copyright 2006 by Head Butler Inc.