BOOKS: The poet laureate looks back

A MEMOIR OF A LIFE IN POETRY

By Donald Hall

Houghton Mifflin, $24, 195 pages

REVIEWED BY MARION elizabeth RODGERS

I first met Donald Hall 30 years ago, when I was a freshman in college, at a poetry reading from his collection, “Kicking the Leaves.” There he stood, a giant bear of a man, in baggy khaki pants, baggy green jacket, tight shirt, fuzzy beard — entrancing his audience. Good poems have dimensions, he once told me. First, as a child, we experience them as “chewy things,” while chanting and skipping rope to the rhymes of Mother Goose. Then, as we age, we come to appreciate poems as objects to hold and touch, like sculpture — “a work of art that pleases the senses and resolves manyness into a whole shape.” I remember how he mesmerized the audience that evening. Unlike the annoying, plaintive whine that modern scribes adopt when reciting their work, Mr. Hall read in resonant baritone, with an actor’s talent for subtle emotion and a poet’s appreciation for language. Enraptured, no one in the audience even coughed.

Donald Hall’s attention to the cadence and placement of words in poetry can be found in his prose. “Unpacking the Boxes” is his first book since being mired in “a blur of activity” as poet laureate of the United States from 2006 to 2007. As the author of 29 books, Mr. Hall recognizes there inevitably will be repetition. Childhood memories of family and his grandparents’ rural New Hampshire farm are told better elsewhere, notably in “Fathers Playing Catch With Sons” and “String Too Short to Be Saved.” Friendships with Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot are explored in “Remembering Poets.” His wife’s illness and death are examined in “The Best Day the Worst Day.”

But such comparisons would be missing the purpose of this slim volume. This memoir is really a series of memory flashes, the sober and amusing reflections culled from 70 boxes sent to him from his deceased mother’s home. As reams of snapshots, manuscripts and letters surface, “my childhood rose like a smoke of moths.” Unpacked, the contents laid “out my childhood and adolescence as if they assembled a model train.”

Until the final chapter are we jolted into the present. Mentally, Mr. Hall is the same youthful, vigorous man of memory - and yet, looking into the eyes of strangers, he can see that they make out someone old: “It is an identity, old.” With poignancy, he tells what it is like to inhabit this odd “planet of antiquity” and how he copes with the creaks, falls, strokes, catheters, fatigue, depression — even the ridiculous. If, as Mr. Hall said, one of the reasons for art is to “embrace common feeling,” then this memoir, written by one of America’s best wordsmiths, accomplishes that and more.

In addition to the familiar, there is new material. Mr. Hall recalls growing up as an adored only child in Hamden, Conn. (near New Haven), during the Depression. His father worked his whole life at the family Brock-Hall Dairy, and hated it. “From an early age,” Mr. Hall says about his father, “I was told that he shook his fist over my cradle, saying, ’He’s going to do what he wants to do.’” At age 14, Mr. Hall resolved to be a poet, and it is a testament to his parents and Mr. Hall’s talent that he actually lived the life he has dreamed of.

The privileged Exeter Academy is “the dysphoric hell that provided access to Heaven.” On Saturday nights, apart from his peers, Mr. Hall stays in his room writing poetry, “in love with silence and solitude,” “alone with language and ambition.” The public humiliation by a sadistic English teacher does nothing to quell his aspirations. Heaven is Harvard, and so is Christ Church, Oxford, “a paradise of poets and theater.” Both provide affirmation and the company of lifelong friends: Adrienne Rich, Robert Bly, George Plimpton, John Ashbery, Daniel Ellsberg, Frank O’Hara. (Mr. Hall’s steady correspondence with Robert Bly, dating from the 1940s to the present, could be another book by itself). Gifted and confident, Mr. Hall forges ahead, reaping awards and praise. When, in 1955, his first book of poems is published (“Exiles and Marriages”), Mr. Hall reads Time’s glowing review to his dying father, who stammers “My cup … runneth … over.”

Teaching English in Ann Arbor, Mich., provides Hall with structure and regularity after his failed first marriage. As “poetry’s evangelist,” he finds pleasure in winning students over to poetry by reading aloud to them. Later, upon entering the lecture circuit, he wins audiences over to his own poetry. In 1972, he marries Jane Kenyon, a poet 19 years his junior.

A microphone, emblazoned with National Public Radio’s logo, gained me entrance to his beloved Eagle Pond Farm. There I encountered him, liberated from teaching with the success of “On Writing Well,” blissful in his second marriage. With Jane by his side, he confesses in these memoirs, “I became stable and clear-sighted, addicted to her and to work.” He was at the peak of happiness, bouncing from simultaneous projects (books, articles, short stories, and poems - always the poems), endlessly revising. In one sun-drenched room I glimpsed a statue, given by Henry Moore, balanced atop heaps of mail. Shelves of books, crammed two rows deep, occupied every wall. They curved around windows and wound up narrow stairs. Outside the door was a blaze of peonies, planted by his wife. All were in full bloom.

After Jane Kenyon’s untimely death of leukemia at the age of 47, he writes, “grief’s house replaced the house of love and poetry.” Losing her, “I lost the rudder to my ship and sailed in circles on a dreary sea.” Deep in the country, no one could hear his desperate wails. “My outbursts frightened our dog Gus, who wondered what he had done wrong.” Several times each day the dog tried to comfort his master by bringing one of Jane’s slippers, and setting it on the floor beside him.

Mourning gives way to mania. He harbors fantasies of “ingenious and foolproof plots and devices” of suicide. With brutal candor, Mr. Hall describes a succession of lovers and one-night-stands. Eventually these diminish, as his entire system shuts down. Jane’s absence fills the house.”“She will remain, filling the air around me like a rainy day.”

After Mr. Hall’s “Warholian 15 minutes” as poet laureate, he has become philosophical. “Indeed, I want to live.” Sustained by the tender attention of children, grandchildren and friends, he savors the moment, determined to be here long enough to “drink champagne at the weddings of grandchildren,” and “write poems as long as I can.”

I met Donald Hall only briefly, three times in my life; he would not remember me. So I am not betraying any creed that limits ethical reviewers from touting the books written by their friends. He once said that the ideal of every poet is to bring everything that ever happened to him into one intense moment of revelation, so that, in Ezra Pound’s metaphor, we may “pick up magic.” “Unpacking the Boxes” may not stand as one of Donald Hall’s best, but in its honesty and candor, poignancy and grace, written at the age of 80 “in the thin air of antiquity’s planet,” there is still much magic for us to gather.

• Marion Elizabeth Rodgers is the biographer of “Mencken: The American Iconoclast” (Oxford paperback, 2007).