The Painted Bed

living from day to day, donald hall quotes himself from an earlier book, The Long Day' for a section epigram: `Work, love, build a house, and die.' a shakespearean summation of hall's life with his wife, the poet, jane kenyon, expressed after her death. one must appreciate the difficulty overcome to write the poems in The Painted Bed. `When she died, he died also. For the first year his immediate grief confused him into feeling alive. He endured the grief of a two-month love affair. When women angry and free generously visited the frenzy of his erotic grief, melancholia became ecstasy, then sank under successful dirt.' the above stanzas from the first poem, Kill the Day, tally the tones as prologue of a collection of what, with the exception of the poem `Day Lilies on the Hill' could be considered one long poem. the death of hall's wife, his stages of grief, the subsequent number of women as lovers who arrived later, and an affirmation of `delicious' resignation written in the collection's final poem , `affirmation' : `To grow is to lose everything. __________________________________________ Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge and affirm that is fitting and delicious to lose everything.' hall is due immense respect for a work ethic he brings to the life of the poet, a profession without time clock, by going to work even on the worst of days. the work of the poet is not lost. ' "The days you work," said O'Keeffe, "are the best days." Work without love is idle ...' poems in `the painted bed' are presented in different forms. hall also draws psychological sustenance from the poets who wrote before him. one of them thomas hardy, from his poem `The Voice', hall borrows for an epigram: `Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward And the woman calling.' most telling is the hardy's first stanza: `Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, Saying that now you are not as you were When you had changed from the one who was all to me, But as at first, when our day was fair.' Daylilies on the Hill, composed in unrhymed sestinas, between 1975-1089, chronicles in part the personal history of hall's grandparents, the house of theirs built in the 19th century, inherited by donald hall, and of the neighbors and rural new england farm life.

Heartbreak recollected in sublimity. The long "Daylilies" poem tells of the loss of the poet's family members over two centuries in his New Hampshire farmhouse. Walls, beams, lathe, handmade nails, everything about the house goes into a sense of infinite loss over the centuries and parallels the loss of his wife. We all go into the night, but it's great to go in the hands of a poet like Hall.

At 47 Jane Kenyon, much younger than her husband Donald Hall, should have buried him; but that was not meant to be. In this slim volume of poetry, Hall writes eloquently of his wife's death, his love for her, his grief, despair and eventual acceptance of life without his wife. The poems are best if read straight through. They are highly personal, sometimes almost embarrassingly so. We should thank Mr. Hall for sharing his most intimate thoughts on such a private and painful subject. Mr. Hall's imagery is beautiful. Listen to the opening lines of "Kill The Day." "When she died it was as if her car accelerated off the pier's end and zoomed upward over death water for a year without gaining or losing altitude. . . " In the poem "Ardor" lust is described as "grief that has turned over in bed to look the other way." Finally in the concluding poem in the book "Affirmation" Hall describes the indifference of the young to growing old with this wonderful image: "we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content." These poems bring, if not comfort, at least the knowldge that we are not alone in our own losses. As in all good art, the particular becomes the universal.

Hall's verse not only vivifies the one he mourns for, but also awakens and afflicts the reader with a sympathetic alertness; moreover, the stanzas of the poems, both rhymed and un-, represent his best writing in verse since the days of "The One Day." Perhaps such evaluations are an impertinence as we ponder poems born of such grief; nonetheless, Hall deserves praise for his esthetic accomplishment and his intimately human voice. The language does not falter.If the price of a hardcover book proves prohibitive, one might fly to the nearest bookstore, pluck "The Painted Bed" from the shelves, and sit on a chair or a patch of carpet and receive these words as one might receive the language of a liturgy. The stations of Hall's grief are composed of stately phrases and living words. Few books of poetry can be described with justice as necessary to acquire and to absorb; Hall's collection of elegies is such a book -- vital in the sense of necessary, and in the sense of helping one to live.

I heard the author interviewed on Fresh Air today and was enthralled by the reading of his poetry. I lost my mom to cancer three years ago and want to buy this collection not only for myself but also for my dad, who has gone through many of the same stages of grief and mourning as the author. Now that my dad is coming out on the other side -- and learning to live fully again, but always with the memories of my mom not far away -- I think he might appreciate this honest voice that explores emotion, loss, and self. If the poems Hall read on Fresh Air are any indication, the rest of this collection will be quite moving and memorable.