White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006

Donald Hall, past Poet Laureate of the United States, has had a long and fruitful career. This compilation is well done - hardcover, good paper, clean printing and attractive typeface, and includes Hall's best work. His poems can make you laugh, or sigh, or weep. This is a "must have" for anyone who loves and values poetry.

I feel somewhat embarrassed to say that Donald Hall was not a poet I was familiar with until just recently. And what a great thing I have been missing. I realized that Donald Hall was in a very old anthology I have from 1963 called "The Modern Poets." There is a jaunty photo of him smoking a cigar. The Bio does not mention his wife Jane Kenyon. What a powerful effect these poems had on me. The come alive in a way I cannot accurately describe. They bring me closer to things I seem to remember, and with simplicity and depth, deliver the earth to my feet. Don't take my word for it. Take a look into this world for yourself.

Donald Hall's newest selected poems contains the distillation of sixty years worth of work in the fields of poetry. If the selection is not uniformly excellent, it displays a consistent ability to work well within a variety of poetic forms and styles and contains enough top-shelf poems to make any reader rejoice. If you've never read the work of our newest poet laureate to-be, this volume makes an excellent introduction.

How pathetic is this? I was the kid who liked poetry in school and memorized poems that weren't even assigned. I have a large poetry collection. I regularly steal lines from poets. And yet I never paid close attention to Donald Hall until recently, when he was named Poet Laureate. So the other day, as an act of penance as much as curiosity, I settled myself on the couch with the best poems he's written in a career that has seen him publish for every year I've been alive. What a ride I took. What a ride awaits you. What a great thing has happened to make Hall visible to the multitudes while he is still among us. It is easy to say that Hall is the successor to Robert Frost. His family had a farm in New Hampshire, he met Frost when he was young and impressionable, and many of his poems are set in the world of farmers --- gruff men, in a harsh landscape. Theirs is a hard life, but then, Hall seems to say, in poem after poem, so is all life. "Like an old man," he writes, "whatever I touch I turn/to the story of death." And, again, "Birth is the fear of death." At that point, I reached for a pencil; I could see that Hall's lines have the quotable appeal of smart, direct speech --- the speech of a crusty, independent thinker. Like this: "In America, the past exists/in the library." The past and the process of aging are Hall's continuing subjects, and he's anything but "poetic" in the way he deals with them. Here's "The Young Watch Us," an early poem: The young girls look up as we walk past the line at the movie, and go back to examining their fingernails. Their boyfriends are combing their hair, and chew gum as if they meant to insult us. Today we made love all day. I look at you. You are smiling on the sidewalk, dear wrinkled face. So much for the expected conclusion: envy of the young. But surprise is what you get time after time in these poems. When men on airplanes ask Hall, "What are you in?" he replies that he's "in" poetry and goes on to tell us about the lunchtime reading he gives to their wives at the "Women's Goodness Club." After, he goes to his motel room, watches 'Godzilla Sucks Mount Fuji' and thinks of the children of those men and women: "Will you ever be old and dumb, like your creepy parents? Not you, not you, not you, not you, not you, not you." The surprise, of course, is that these poems go down like thin white wine --- you know, those German wines that are easy to drink as water but pack a kick you don't expect. This is a man who reads the obituaries in the Boston Globe "for the mean age." And there he spots a squib about Emily Farr, dead after a long illness in Oregon. He writes: Once in an old house we talked for an hour, while a coal fire brightened in November twilight and wavered our shadows high on the wall until our eyes fixed on each other. Thirty years ago. Those last three words are, for me, breathtaking. But then, I'm not a kid, reading poetry for clues about what's next. I too can remember women

Hall has been a poet for six decades, a dedicated craftsmen whose poetry turned more personal and autobiographical in the latter years. His most notable recent poems have had to do with his mourning for his wife, the poet Joan Kenyon. But the element of elegy and loss of friends has been a main theme of his poetry for many years. Wikipedia writes of him, " His recurring themes include New England rural living, baseball, and how work conveys meaning to ordinary life. He is regarded as a master both of poetic forms and free verse, and a champion of the art of revision, for whom writing is first and foremost a craft, not merely a mode of self-expression." One of the most well- known of his poems for his wife is called 'Distressed Haiku' Another of the elegaic poems is the title poem of this collection in which he writes of the loss of his father. His poetry has often a sharp ironic note. There is a clear, hard feeling in it. There is something wonderfully special about a volume of collected poems, giving the reader as it does a chance to feel and sense the liftetime struggle and accomplishment of the poet .This is especially so when as in Hall's case the poems of the end of the life are among the most moving of all.