Donald Hall, Poet Laureate

How pathetic is this? I was the kid who liked poetry in schooland memorized poems that weren't even assigned. I have a large poetrycollection. I regularly steal lines from poets. And yet I never paidclose attention to Donald Hall until recently, when he was named PoetLaureate.

So the other day, as an act of penance as much as curiosity, I settledmyself on the couch with the best poems he's written in a career thathas seen him publish for every year I've been alive: White Apples andthe Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006 (Houghton Mifflin, 2006).

What a ride I took. What a ride awaits you. What a great thing hashappened to make Hall visible to the multitudes while he is still amongus.

It is easy to say that Hall is the successor to Robert Frost. Hisfamily had a farm in New Hampshire, he met Frost when he was young andimpressionable, 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 ofdeath."

And, again, "Birth is the fear of death."

At that point, I reached for a pencil; I could see that Hall's lineshave the quotable appeal of smart, direct speech -- the speech of acrusty, independent thinker. Like this: "In America, the past exists/inthe library."

The past and the process of aging are Hall's continuing subjects, andhe's anything but "poetic" in the way he deals with them. Here's "TheYoung 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 iswhat you get time after time in these poems. When men on airplanes askHall, "What are you in?" he replies that he's "in" poetry and goes onto 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 andwomen: "Will you ever be old and dumb, like your creepy parents? Notyou, not you, not you, not you, not you, not you."

The surprise, of course, is that these poems go down like thin whitewine (you know, those German wines that are easy to drink as water butpack a kick you don't expect). This is a man who reads the obituariesin the Boston Globe "for the mean age." And there he spots a squibabout 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 akid, reading poetry for clues about what's next. I, too, can rememberwomen from three decades ago, and the impression I had of them, and thechoices 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 becomethe singular subject of his most famous poems. In 1972, while teachingat the University of Michigan, he married Jane Kenyon, one of hisstudents, 19 years his junior, A few years later, he quit teaching andthey moved to his family's farm in New Hampshire. He endured herdepressions, adored her mind and libido; they were a great match. In1989, Hall was diagnosed with colon cancer, which metastasized to hisliver. Although he went into remission, he had no illusions that hewould live long.

Hall wrote a memoir, The Best Day The Worst Day: Life With Jane Kenyon(Houghton Mifflin, 2005), which friends describe as a love story thatrips your heart out. I believe it, for I rocked, weeping, on the couchfor hours as I read the poems in "White Apples" that tell this samestory.

Oh, there is great humor in this book, especially a long poem aboutrunaway heifers that keep Hall from watching Monday Night Football.Pretty much the whole neighborhood gathers to chat and speculate. Onefarmer jokes that Hall should keep them: "Feed them poems.They tell/you've got extra. They tell you keep bales/of poems stackedin the hayloft." And there are 75 pages of baseball-relatedpoems. But don't be sidetracked; the book is leading up to Jane, andher illness, and his astonishment that she will die first.

These poems are intimate in the way of an hour-by-hour journal. Donaldand Jane revise her obituary and her poems together ("Wasn't that fun?"she says. "To work together? Wasn't that fun?"), they choose her finaldress 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: "Lustis grief/that has turned over in bed/to look the other way."And, finally, he writes of accepting the deal that is life: "Itis 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 roadwhere 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.

Jesse Kornbluth is a New York-based journalist and founder of HeadButler.com, a cultural concierge site and free daily e-mailfeaturing information on new and classic books, movies and music.