The personal as poetry in Hall’s collected verse

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.”

At times Mr. Hall takes a less than uplifting look at the whole business of putting words on the page, especially when the subject is close to unendurable. In the longish and very fine “Letter at Christmas,” he steps outside to check the weather and pass on the news to the absent woman; then it is “Time for the desk again. / I tell Gus, ‘Poetryman / is suiting up!’”

As a poetry man Mr. Hall suited up early, publishing his first book when he was a junior fellow at Harvard, and even before that taking an Oxford degree and an active role in introducing the English to what was happening in American verse. He wrote lively essays about his experiences and interviews with significant predecessors — Eliot, Pound, Frost — and turned out at regular intervals slim volumes in changing styles, from tersely ironic to more psychologically open, “deep image” (as it was called) ventures.

But it was when he wrote about his own life, especially the summers spent with his grandparents on the New Hampshire farm where he still lives, that his poetry became more expansive and humanly explorative. In a three-part long poem, “The One Day,” he managed to combine Whitman-like range of perception with moments of satiric and passionate anger at what was happening to the American landscape: “Survey, cut a road, subdivide, bulldoze / the unpainted barn … build Slope’ n’ Shore, name the new / road Blueberry Muffin Lane …”

In “The Museum of Clear Ideas” (1993), Mr. Hall showed himself a brilliant formalist, writing a superb poem about baseball (“Baseball”) in an ingenious syllabic verse where each “inning” is composed of nine stanzas of nine lines each, and in which the witty and serious are wholly intertwined. At about this time, he fell dangerously ill, had part of a cancerous liver removed, and survived — only to have Jane Kenyon stricken with the leukemia that, after a failed bone marrow transplant, would kill her.

The last hundred pages of “White Apples and the Taste of Stone” are about her illness, her death, and the husband-poet’s retrospective formulations, musings, and outcries, in “letters” written to her four days, four months, a year afterwards: “Your presence in this house / is almost as enormous / and painful as your absence” (“Letter with No Address”).

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