Donald Hall

[Liam]

Throughout his writing life Donald Hall (1928-2018) garnered numerous accolades and honors, culminating in 2006 with his appointment as poet laureate of the United States.

I recently came across a freshly published volume (well, 2006, to be exact), White Apples and the Taste of Stone, which collects approximately two hundred of Hall's best-loved poems written over the last sixty years.

(It is currently on sale on Amazon for a mind-boggling $7, if anyone's interested. The book includes a CD with a number of poems read by the author).

His poetry can best be described as simple, episodic and prone to spontaneous epiphany. Hall's general "style" can be described as minimalist, I think, although I don't know nearly enough about modern poetry to be absolutely sure. (I just know that I find him very readable, easy-going, and full of feeling).

He writes mostly about nature, memory, human relationships, life in the city and the folly of love. I have read one full collection by him to date, namely The Yellow Room (1971), which includes the following love/nature poem (The Snail):

Soft liquid feet
adhere it; your eye
draws me to it. On a dark green
leaf of the street
we walk in this solitude
we made to inhabit,
your delicate
hand gestures
as the slow head
emerges with a quality
of certainty, wavers
in the warm, sweet
air, and nibbles
shiny leaves. We found it
together, this fragile life
ventured outside the planet
it carries.


I love how this poem succeeds in being both a love poem AND a nature poem (as well as a reflection-on-the-day-gone-by poem), .

 

[Mirabell]

Donald Hall is sooooooo fantastic!

 

[Liam]

Um. Say more, .

I just ordered my copy of White Apples and the Taste of Stone. Perhaps I'll post more poems later, after it arrives in the mail, .

 

[Liam]

I just ordered my copy of White Apples and the Taste of Stone.

I have read approximately 70+ pages of this mind-boggling 400-pp. collection and WOW, what a poet. Perceptive, linguistically innovative and psychologically acute. It would be a pleasure to see him win the Nobel Prize but then again, he's already been much honored in his home country as a poet laureate.

His early poems, composed throughout his teens and 20s, are decidedly Frostian in nature; consider this bit from a longer poem Elegy for Wesley Wells:

The farmer dead, his horse will run to fat,
Go stiff and lame and whinny from his stall,
His dogs will whimper through the webby barn,
Where spiders close his tools in a pale gauze
And wait for flies. The nervous woodchuck now
Will waddle plumply through the garden weeds,
Eating wild peas as if he owned the land,
And the fat hedgehog pick the apple trees.

...​

The poem that inspired the title of the collection is about the death of his father:

White Apples

when my father had been dead a week
I woke
with his voice in my ear

I sat up in bed

and held my breath
and stared at the pale closed door

white apples and the taste of stone

if he called again
I would put on my coat and galoshes

...​

The book includes a CD with some of the poems read by the author; but I haven't listened to it yet.

 

[Liam]

A new collection (95-pp.), The Back Chamber, is hot off the presses (released yesterday).

I have placed a hold on it at my local library, but they still haven't entered the book into the system, and I'm at # 2 on the waiting list, anyway. Will say more after I read the collection.

 

[Liam]

I have finally finished reading Donald Hall's stupendous White Apples and the Taste of Stone (collecting, in a single 400-pp. volume, the poetry of the last sixty years of Hall's work as a poet), and my god, what a poet! I wasn't really taken with his baseball poems, for which he is mostly (perhaps even justly) famous in this country; his later period, immediately following the death of his wife and fellow-poet Jane Kenyon and resulting in beautiful, palpitating poems of anguish and loss, is probably my favorite. But I loved, well and truly loved, many poems from across Hall's long and varied career, not least of all the narrative poems (of which Wolf Knife is the undisputed masterpiece) or the poems of memory, the poet's childhood on the family farm (The Table, My Aunt Liz, Names of Horses).

Creating new and surprising images out of the simplest of words, Hall's lines (and sometimes even whole poems) are instantly memorable: "Now the wood is dark with old pleasures," "Forget tomorrow's blueberries; eat today's," "little green testicles dropped from the oaks," "The cat stretches awake, yawning, after a dream of sparrows," "I wake hollow as a thighbone with its marrow picked out" (the last line written immediately after the death of Jane Kenyon, from leukemia or cancer of the bone marrow). Life and death always exist side-by-side in Hall's poems, often resulting in beautiful, breathtaking images of movement and decay: "When the bear dies, bees construct honey from nectar of cinquefoil growing through rib bones," and later: "low raspberries will part rib bones."

Nature, the stillness of nature and the perpetual turmoil of nature exist simultaneously with the human civilization; consider, for instance, the following lines from To Build a House:

This morning we watch tall poppies light up
in a field of grass. At the town dump, one styrofoam cup
endures eight hundred years. Under the barn,
fat and ancient grandfather spider sleeps
among old spoked wheels: Our breathing shakes his web:
It is always this time; the time that we live by
is this time. Together we walk in the high orchard
at noon; it is cool, although the sun poises upon us.
Among old trees the creek breathes slowly,
bordered by fern. The toad at out feet holds still.

The poems I have chosen to quote below are obviously my favorites but, with the obvious exclusion of the baseball poems, they also represent Hall's entire oeuvre as a poet: the poems of loss, the poems of incident, the poems of memory, the poems of nature, the narrative poems, and the philosophical poems. It might be helpful to bear in mind, when reading Her Garden, Summer Kitchen, and The Wish, that these three poems are addressed to the memory of Hall's wife of many years, Jane Kenyon. For an Exchange of Rings talks, I think, about the love affair between Fanny Brawne and the young John Keats. I chose to conclude with two poems from Hall's latest volume, The Back Chamber: one is a typical crypto-poetic reflection on love and sex that has become almost customary with Hall; the other is a moving and poignant recollection of September 11, when Hall watched the unfolding horror on his television set from a hundred miles away.

Although I'd be hard-pressed to select a single favorite from among Hall's poems, I would say that Wolf Knife, My Aunt Liz and Names of Horses are definitely up there. I do hope that many of you here will find his poetry as profound and enjoyable as I have in these last few months.

…​

Je Suis une Table

It has happened suddenly,
by surprise, in an arbor,
or while drinking good coffee,
after speaking, or before,

that I dumbly inhabit
a density; in language,
there is nothing to stop it,
for nothing retains an edge.

Simple ignorance presents,
later, words for a function,
but it is common pretense
of speech, by a convention,

and there is nothing at all
but inner silence, nothing
to relieve on principle
now this intense thickening.

…​

Orange Knee Socks

When he lies in the night away from her,
the backs of his eyelids burn.
He turns in the darkness as if it were an oven.
The flesh parches and he lies awake
thinking of everything wrong.

In the morning when he goes to meet her,
his heart struggles at his ribs
like an animal trapped in its burrow.
Then he sees her running to meet him,
red-faced with hurry and cold.

She stumbles over the snow.
Her knees above orange knee socks
bob in a froth of the hems
of skirt and coat and petticoat.
Her eyes have not shut all night.

…​

Digging

One midnight, after a day when lilies
lift themselves out of the ground while you watch them,
and you come into the house at dark
your fingers grubby with digging, your eyes
vague with the pleasure of digging,

let a wind raised from the South
climb through your bedroom window, lift you in its arms
—you have become as small as a seed—
and carry you out of the house, over the black garden,
spinning and fluttering,

and drop you in cracked ground.
The dirt will be cool, rough to your clasped skin
like a man you have never known.
You will die into the ground
in a dead sleep, surrendered to water.

You will wake suffering
a widening pain in your side, a breach
gapped in your tight ribs
where a green shoot struggles to lift itself upward
through the tomb of your dead flesh

to the sun, to the air of your garden
where you will blossom
in the shape of your own self, thoughtless
with flowers, speaking
to bees, in the language of green and yellow, white and red.

…​

The Table

Walking back to the farm from the depot,
Riley slapped flies with his tail.
Twilight. Crickets scraped
in the green standing hay by the road.
The voice of my grandfather
spoke through a motion of gnats.
I held his hand. I entered
the sway of a horse.

At the brown table
I propped books on each other.
All morning in the room my skin
took into itself small discs
of coolness.
Then I walked in the cut hayfield
by the barn, and lay alone
in the little valley of noon heat,
in the village of little sounds.
Grasshoppers
tickled my neck and I let them.
I turned into the other world
that lives in the air. Clouds passed
like motes.

My grandfather
clanked up the road on his mowing machine,
behind Riley dark with sweat.
I ran to the barn
and carried a bucket of water
to the loose jaws working
in the dark stall. For lunch
I sliced an onion.
Then we raked hay into mounds
and my grandfather pitched it up
where I tucked it in place on the hayrack.

My skin dried in the sun. Wind
caught me in clover.
The slow ride
back to the barn, I dangled
legs over split-pole rails
while my grandfather talked forever
in a voice that wrapped me around
with love that asked for nothing.
In my room I drank well water
that whitened the sides of a tumbler
and coolness gathered like dark
inside my stomach.

This morning
I walk to the shaded bedroom and lean
on the drop-leaf table.

The table hums
a song to itself without sense
and I hear the voice of the heaving
ribs of Riley
and grasshoppers
haying the fields of the air.

…​

Stones

Now it is gone, all of it.
No, it is there,
a rock island twelve miles offshore
in the Atlantic. Straight cliffs,
salt grass on top,
rabbits, snipe.

At lowest tide,
a scrap of sand; maybe once a year
the sea is so calm
that an island man beaches his coracle,
wedges the anchor in stone,
and rock-climbs to the top.

He traps small game,
listening to the wind, fearful
of skull island.
Monks in the Middle Ages
lived in a stone house here
whole lives.

…​

The High Pasture

I am the hounds,
I am the fox.

I wake reassembling
torn muscle and fur

to run again
over raw fields

to a corner of stone.
I twitch

awake with the crazy
intolerable scent

of me in my nostrils.
Yet I am also the leaf

that breathes
slowly in the sun

by the wooden bridge
at the end of the pond

in the high pasture.

…​

Adultery at Forty

At the shower's head, high over the porcelain moonscape,
a water drop gathers itself darkly, hangs, shakes, trembles,
and hesitates, uncertain in which direction to hurl itself.

…​

For an Exchange of Rings

They rise into mind,
the young lovers
of eighteen nineteen:
As they walk together
in a walled garden
of Hampstead, tremulous,
their breathing quick,
color high, eyes lucent,
he places the floral
ring with its almondine
stone on her finger.
Although in two winters,
hopeless in Rome,
her letters unopened
beside him, he will
sweat, cough, and die;
although forty years
later a small old
woman will wear
his ring and locket
of hair as she stops
breathing—now, in
Hampstead, in eighteen
nineteen, they are
wholly indifferent
to other days as they
moisten and swell.

…​

The Cup

From the Studebaker's back seat, on our Sunday drives,
I watched her earrings sway. Then I walked uphill
beside an old man carrying buckets
under birches on an August day. Striding at noontime,
I looked at wheat and at river cities. In the crib
my daughter sighed opening her eyes. I kissed the cheek
of my father dying. By the pond an acorn fell.
You listening here, you reading these words as I write them,
I offer this cup to you: Though we drink
from this cup every day, we will never drink it dry.

…​

Carol

The warmth of cows
That chewed on hay
And cherubim
Protected Him
As small He lay.

Chickens and sheep
Knew He was there
Because all night
A holy light
Suffused the air.

Darkness was long
And the sun brief
When the Child arose
A man of sorrows
And friend to grief.

…​

My Aunt Liz

My aunt the English teacher,
who wrote verses for Hallmark cards
and looked like my mother
only younger and plumper, took me
walking in the woods
when I was five. She stirred me with stories
about a one-eyed
giant outwitted by a clever Greek
sailor; about a wooden
puppet whose nose elongated
when he told a lie.
Aunt Liz was pretty, generous, moody,
and fierce in affections
and desires. I cherished her. When I
was eleven or twelve,
one summer when she was without love
and lonely in her thirties,
she visited the farm. She took
to crawling into
my bed for a cuddle as I woke up
until one morning,
as she squeezed herself against me, Liz flushed
and leapt from bed, saying
I was grown up now; she was sorry.

…​

Her Garden

I let her garden go.
let it go, let it go
How can I watch the hummingbird
Hover to sip
With its beak's tip
The purple bee balm—whirring as we heard
It years ago?

The weeds rise rank and thick
let it go, let it go
Where annuals grew and burdock grows,
Where standing she
At once could see
The peony, the lily and the rose
Rise over brick

She'd laid in patters. Moss
let it go, let it go
Turns the bricks green, softening them
By the gray rocks
Where hollyhocks
That lofted while she lived, stem by tall stem,
Blossom with loss.

…​

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.

…​

The Wish

I keep her weary ghost inside me.
"Oh, let me go," I hear her crying.
"Deep in your dark you want to hide me
And so perpetuate my dying.
I can't undo
The grief that you
Weep by the stone where I am lying.
Oh, let me go."

By work and women half distracted,
I endure the day and sleep at night
To watch her dying reenacted
When the cold dawn descends like twilight.
How can I let
This dream forget
Her white withdrawal from my sight,
And let her go?

Her body as I watch grows smaller;
Her face recedes, her kiss is colder.
Watching her disappear, I call her,
"Come back!" as I grow old and older,
While somewhere deep
In the catch of sleep
I hear her cry, as I reach to hold her,
"Oh, let me go."

 

[Liam]

Wolf Knife

from the Journals of C. F. Hoyt, USN, 1826-1889

In mid-August, in the second year
of my First Polar Expedition, the snows and ice of winter
almost upon us, Kantiuk and I
attempted to dash by sledge
along Crispin Bay, searching again for relics
of the Franklin Expedition. Now a storm blew,
and we turned back, and we struggled slowly
in snow, lest we depart land and venture onto ice
from which a sudden fog and thaw
would abandon us to the Providence
of the sea.

Near nightfall
I thought I heard snarling behind us.
Kantiuk told me
that two wolves, lean as the bones
of a wrecked ship,
had followed us the last hour, and snapped their teeth
as if already feasting.
I carried but the one charge
in my rifle, since, approaching the second winter,
we rationed stores.

As it turned dark,
we could push no farther, and made
camp in a corner of ice-hummocks,
and the wolves stopped also, growling
just past the limits of vision,
coming closer, until I could hear
the click of their feet on ice. Kantiuk laughed
and remarked that the wolves appeared to be most hungry.
I raised my rifle, prepared to shoot the first
that ventured close, hoping
to frighten the other.

Kantiuk struck my rifle
down, and said again
that the wolves were hungry, and laughed.
I feared that my old companion
was mad, here in the storm, among ice-hummocks,
stalked by wolves. Now Kantiuk searched
in his pack, and extricated
two knives—turnoks, the Inuit called them—
which by great labor were sharpened, on both sides,
to a sharpness like the edge of a barber's razor,
and approached our dogs
and plunged both knives
into the body of our youngest dog
who had limped all day.

I remember
that I considered turning my rifle on Kantiuk
as he approached, then passed me,
carrying knives red with the gore of our dog—
who had yowled, moaned, and now lay
expiring, surrounded
by curious cousins and uncles,
possibly hungry—and thrust the knives
handle-down in the snow.

Immediately
he left the knives, the vague, gray
shapes of the wolves
turned solid, out of the darkness and the snow,
and set ravenously
to licking the blood from the honed steel.
The double edge of the knives
so lacerated the tongues of the starved beasts
that their own blood poured
copiously forth
to replenish the dog's blood, and they ate
more furiously than before, while Kantiuk laughed,
and held his sides
laughing.

And I laughed also,
perhaps in relief that Providence had delivered us
yet again, or perhaps—under conditions of extremity,
far from Connecticut—finding these creatures
acutely ridiculous, so avid
to swallow their own blood. First one, and then the other
collapsed, dying,
bloodless in the snow black with their own blood,
and Kantiuk retrieved
his turnoks, and hacked lean meat
from the thigh of the larger wolf,
which we ate
gratefully, blessing the Creator, for we were hungry.

 

[Liam]

Names of Horses

All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding
and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul
sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer,
for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the summering range.

In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields,
dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with oats.
All summer you mowed the grass in meadow and hayfield, the mowing machine
clacketing beside you, while the sun walked high in the morning;
and after noon's heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same acres,
gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack,
and the built hayrack back, up hill to the chaffy barn,
three loads of hay a day, hanging wide from the hayrack.

Sundays you trotted the two miles to church with the light load
of a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns.
Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the window sill
of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smoothes glass.

When you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending to graze,
one October the man who fed you and kept you, and harnessed you every morning,
led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond,
and dug a hole beside you where you stood shuddering in your skin,

and laid the shotgun's muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your ear,
and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave,
shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above you,
where by next summer a dent in the ground made your monument.

For a hundred and fifty years, in the pasture of dead horses,
roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,
yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter
frost heaved your bones in the ground—old toilers, soil makers:

O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.

 

[Liam]

Love's Progress

When love empties itself out,
it fills our bodies full.

For an hour we lie twining
pulse and skin together

like nurslings who sigh
and doze, dreamy with milk.

…​

The Number

Carolyn telephoned me from Ohio to tell me:
"Turn on your TV. Turn on any channel."
The first thing I saw was the second plane
plunging into the south tower over and over.

Turn on your TV. Turn on any channel.
I saw small people jump holding hands
plunging from the south tower over and over.
The whole world watched them falling.

I saw small people jump holding hands
and understood that all of us would perish.
The whole world watched them falling
through smoke that rose in September's air.

I understood that all of us would perish
as I sat in horror two hundred miles away
from smoke that rose in September's air.
Leaves turned red on the tips of branches

as I sat in horror two hundred miles away.
Only Ragged Mountain remained permanent
where leaves turned red on the tips of branches
at the start of the terrifying millennium.

Only Ragged Mountain remained permanent.
I thought of cities without food or succor
at the start of the terrifying millennium.
Who could look away from the fire and dying,

thinking of cities without food and succor?
Carolyn telephoned me from Ohio to tell me.
Who could look away from the fire and dying?
The first thing I saw was the second plane.

(from The Back Chamber)

 

[Liam]

Now that the task is done, I hope this will get Stewart to seek out and read more poetry!

Anyway, Stewart, I hope you will enjoy Wolf Knife, at least. Remember, read it like a short story with weird line-breaks. But My Aunt Liz is also a very funny and poignant piece.

 

[Liam]

The news of his passing brought tears to my eyes. I loved his poetry. Rest in peace.