The Selected Poems of Donald Hall - Hardcover

Hall, Donald

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0544555600 ISBN 13: 9780544555600

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015

Synopsis

Former poet laureate Donald Hall selects the essential work from a moving and brilliant life in poetry.

Long-Listed for the 2016 National Book Award

Donald Hall was an American master, one of the nation’s most beloved and accomplished poets. Here, in his eighties, having taken stock of the body of his work—rigorous, gorgeous verse that is the result of seventy years of “ambition and pleasure”—he strips it down. 

The Selected Poems of Donald Hall reflects the poet’s handpicked, concise selection, showcasing work rich with humor and eros and “a kind of simplicity that succeeds in engaging the reader in the first few lines” (Billy Collins).

From the enduring “My Son My Executioner” to “Names of Horses” to “Without,” Donald Hall’s best poems deliver “a banquet in the mouth” (Charles Simic) and an “aching elegance” (Baltimore Sun). For the first-time reader or an old friend, these are, above all others, the poems to read, reread, and remember.  “However wrenching [Hall’s poems] may be from line to line, they tell a story that is essentially reassuring: art and love are compatible, genius is companionable, and people stand by one another in the end” (New York Times Book Review).   

About this title

About the Author

DONALD HALL (1928-2018) served as poet laureate of the United States from 2006 to 2007. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a recipient of the National Medal of the Arts, awarded by the president.

From the Back Cover

Gold

Pale gold of the walls, gold
of the centers of daisies, yellow roses
pressing from a clear bowl. All day
we lay on the bed, my hand
stroking the deep
gold of your thighs and your back.
We slept and woke
entering the golden room together,
lay down in it breathing
quickly, then
slowly again,
caressing and dozing, your hand sleepily
touching my hair now.

We made in those days
tiny identical rooms inside our bodies
which the men who uncover our graves
will find in a thousand years,
shining and whole.

From the Inside Flap

When I was twelve I wrote my first poem, and by fourteen I decided that s what I d do my whole life. I don t regret it. from the afterword by Donald Hall

Donald Hall is an American master, one of the nation s most beloved and accomplished poets. Now in his eighties, having taken stock of the body of his work rigorous, gorgeous verse that is the result of seventy years of ambition and pleasure he strips it down.

The Selected Poems of Donald Hall reflects the poet s handpicked, concise selection, showcasing work rich with humor and eros and a kind of simplicity that succeeds in engaging the reader in the first few lines (Billy Collins).

From the enduring My Son My Executioner to Names of Horses to Without, Donald Hall s best poems deliver a banquet in the mouth (Charles Simic) and an aching elegance (Baltimore Sun). For the first-time reader or an old friend, these are, above all others, the poems to read, reread, and remember.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

My Son My Executioner
 
My son, my executioner,
    I take you in my arms,
Quiet and small and just astir
    And whom my body warms.
 
Sweet death, small son, our instrument
    Of immortality,
Your cries and hungers document
    Our bodily decay.
 
We twenty-five and twenty-two,
    Who seemed to live forever,
Observe enduring life in you
    And start to die together.
 
 


The Sleeping Giant
a hill in Connecticut
 
The whole day long, under the walking sun
That poised an eye on me from its high floor,
Holding my toy beside the clapboard house
I looked for him, the summer I was four.
 
I was afraid the waking arm would break
From the loose earth and rub against his eyes
A fist of trees, and the whole country tremble
In the exultant labor of his rise;
 
Then he with giant steps in the small streets
Would stagger, cutting off the sky, to seize
The roofs from house and home because we had
Covered his shape with dirt and planted trees;
 
And then kneel down and rip with fingernails
A trench to pour the enemy Atlantic
Into our basin, and the water rush,
With the streets full and all the voices frantic.
 
That was the summer I expected him.
Later the high and watchful sun instead
Walked low behind the house, and school began,
And winter pulled a sheet over his head.
 


The Lone Ranger
 
Anarchic badlands spread without a road,
And from the river west no turned-up loam;
No farmer prayed for rain, no settler’s horse
But one time blundered riderless to home.
 
Unfriendly birds would gather in the air,
A circling kind of tombstone. As for the law,
No marshal lived for long unless he could
Defeat his mirror’d image to the draw.
 
So now he rode upon a silver horse.
He stood for law and order. Anarchy
Like flood or fire roared through every gate
But he and Tonto hid behind a tree
 
And when the bandits met to split the loot,
He blocked the door. With silver guns he shot
The quick six-shooters from their snatching hands
And took them off to jail and let them rot.
 
For him the badlands were his mother’s face.
He made an order where all order lacked
From Hanged Boy Junction to the Rio Grande.
Why did he wear a mask? He was abstract.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0544555600
• ISBN 13: 9780544555600
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160