Life Work

"Life Work" could be called "Ode to Work". Hall writes lovingly about his work on the family "home" place from his beginning farm work with his grandfather to his own writing work as an adult and inhabitant on the old farm where he now lives with his wife, poet Jane Kenyon. I found his attitude toward work refreshing. I appreciate his reflections on the meaning "work" gives to life. A life well-lived involves work one loves. Work can have a negative connotation in our culture. He upends that view. Not all of us can live his life, but we can find "work" we love be it tending a garden, caring for our family, flying a plane, cooking or something else.

I am a big fan of Donald Hall's writing, both poetry and prose. This is my favorite and the one that made me think the most. It allows one to put one's life in perspective, realize the importance of life and work. We all aren't as lucky as Hall has been to work at what we love, but the book makes you think about how work can become more worthwhile. Deep and enjoyable.

Reading this book is work -- in the Donald Hall definition, for to read it is to become absorbed in each word to the exclusion of all else. Hall writes of his ancestors, of the rocky farms of New England, a small dairy, his father's early death, his wife's gardening, and then quite suddenly as his colon cancer recurs, of the possible end to life and the very prosaic tasks of cancelling readings, putting papers in order for survivors. Throughout, he achieves a sense of time, place and self which crosses generations. He charts both the constants and the increasing changes of the farm which has been in his family for more than a hundred years and the country around it. Hall, like God, love and grace--all of which are found in abundance in this book, abides.

Donald Hall's memoir, The Old Life, is beautifully crafted in prose form. It is full of personal recollections as well as literary references. It is intense, deeply personal, funny, and wonderfully readable. One has a very real sense of who Donald Hall is - his views of life, his passion for baseball and his family, his trials with his own ill health, his love for his wife, Jane Kenyon, also a poet, and his agonizing grief when she dies quite unexpectedly. A beautiful, poignant, literary triumph

Poet Donald Hall somehow manages to talk about the craft of writing and, even in prose, wondrously shapes a poetic work. This book is an excellent depiction of the author's life, as well as a fascinating historical account of Hall's life and background. Contrary to the popular romanticized view of writing or the "anyone can do it" mentality, Hall shows the reader just what his writing has entailed, and it is clearly WORK