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Synopsis
When Donald Hall moved to his grandparents' New Hampshire farm in 1975, his work as a writer must have seemed remote from the harsh physical labor of his ancestors. Hall, a prize-winning poet and author of several dozen books, has devoted his life to the literary arts. In this paean to work, Hall reveals a similar kind of artistry in the lives of his grandparents, Kate and Wesley. From them he learned that the devotion to craft - be it canning vegetables, writing poems, or carting manure - creates its own special discipline and an "absorbedness" that no wage can compensate. Hall has given us affectionate portraits of his New Hampshire clan in String Too Short to Be Saved, the Eagle Pond books, and the bestselling children's book Ox-Cart Man. In Life Work, we see how the writer has modeled his own life on his family's lives of work, solitude, and love. When Hall comes face to face with his own mortality halfway through writing this book, we understand both his obsession with work and its ultimate consolation.
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About the Author
Donald Hall is the author of many volumes of poetry spanning forty years, including The One Day, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, essays, children's books, and criticism.
From Kirkus Reviews
From well-known poet and memoirist Hall (Their Ancient Glittering Eyes, 1992, etc.), a meditation-memoir on the theme of work that becomes something much more when, midway through the writing, the author learns he has cancer. At 63, Hall is mightily productive in poetry, memoir, essay, letter, story, and review, and he sets out to devote part of each working day (for Hall, there are seven of these a week) to writing this book, its title bespeaking its theme. In 1975, we learn, Hall gave up teaching and became a full-time writer, retiring to the farm in Vermont that had once belonged to his grandparents. As the book begins, Hall mourns the recent death of a close friend, preacher, and hard worker; settles on a definition of productive work as a state of ``absorbedness''; touches on history, family, his own literary output, his great love of the work he does, the number of revisions he puts poems through, what time he gets up, what he eats for breakfast and lunch, even when he walks the dog and drops manuscripts off with the typist. A phone call changes the tone of all of this when a routine blood test shows a recurrence of cancer and sends the poet into surgery. A couple of weeks later, facing both chemotherapy and newly diminished odds for living more than another few years, Hall picks up his narrative and--keeps going. Under the deepened shadow of mortality, he writes with eloquent simplicity about the old-fashioned working farm-life of his Vermont grandparents, the declining health of his aging mother, and--with a consummate and moving poise--his father's unhappiness in his own work, and his early death from cancer. History, life, work, art, dedication, love, and courage--all without becoming saccharine or smug or maudlin, in a treasurable small book, poetic in its plainness, about how to live well. (First printing of 25,000) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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