The personal as poetry in Hall's collected verse

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WHITE APPLES AND THE TASTE OF STONE: SELECTED POEMS 1946-2006

By Donald Hall

Houghton Mifflin, $30, 431 pages

REVIEWED BY WILLIAM H. PRITCHARD

Here are 60 years' worth of Donald Hall's poetry. Not long ago, Richard Wilbur brought out a collection of his poems from the same decades, and Mr. Hall now joins him as the two living American poets who have provided us, over an extended period, with oeuvres of amplitude and distinction. Both bring to their poems, in addition to memorable lyric cadence, a critical intelligence that also reveals itself in their prose: Mr. Hall's books of memoirs (the most interesting being "Life Work," 1993) and biographical studies are especially notable.

But the resemblance ends there, since Mr. Hall's verse, increasingly in recent years, has become relentlessly autobiographical, personal in its focus on the man and those loved ones he has lost -- particularly his wife, Jane Kenyon, herself a poet, who died in 1995 at age 47.

Robert Frost once called poetry "a measured amount of all we can say," and suggested that among the things not to be said -- subjects to be kept back, rather -- might well be "friends, wife, children, and self." Mr. Hall made the decision, after his wife's death, to keep back nothing and to expose the self in all its buffetings, its sufferings.

In "Distressed Haiku," he imagines someone asking about his enterprise, "Will Hall ever write / lines that do any thing / but whine and complain?" The question, in its willingness to imagine something other than a pious response to expressions of grief, makes it evident that humor, black as it is, can check the uninhibited flow of sad reflection.

Mr. Hall's humor can sometimes shock, as when in "Letter After a Year," written as so many of the poems are -- to the dead Jane Kenyon -- he visits her grave in April, the spot having been inaccessible in winter weather. He is accompanied, he tells her, by his dog: "Every day Gus and I / take a walk in the graveyard. / I'm the one who doesn't / piss on your stone." He then imagines her asking him, "Where the hell are you?" to which the answer is, "In hell."