Bøger af Donald Hall

"These vivid New Hampshire farm sketches from Hall's well-spent youth-all written when he was full-grown-are as much attuned to the supple and enticing utilities of language as they are grounded in a vanished time which may, at a glimpse, seem simple, but were complex and rich and not simple at all."-Richard Ford This is a collection of story-essays diverse in subject but united by the limitless affection the author holds for the land and the people of New England. Donald Hall tells about life on a small farm where, as a boy, he spent summers with his grandparents. Gradually the boy grows to be a young man, sees his grandparents aging, the farm become marginal, and finally, the cows sold and the barn abandoned. But these are more than nostalgic memories, for in the measured and tender prose of each episode are signs of the end of things: a childhood, perhaps a culture.In an Epilogue written for this edition, Donald Hall describes his return to the farm twenty-five years later, to live the rest of his life in the house that held a box of string too short to be saved.

A beautiful New England Christmas story in the tradition of Dylan Thomas¿ remembrance, A Child¿s Christmas in Wales.In December of 1940, twelve-year-old Donnie Hall gets on a train from his comfortable Connecticut home to fulfill a dream: to spend Christmas with his grandparents on their farm on Eagle Pond in south central New Hampshire.Once there, he settles into the routines he knows well from his summer visits: helping Gramps milk the cows, gathering eggs from the henhouse, chopping wood for the Glenwood in the kitchen. But some things had changed.Winter milk was now picked up not by sleighs drawn by work horses on snow-packed roads, but by gasoline powered trucks. The fancy old red sleigh that had served the family so well was languishing, abandoned in a stall in the barn, and, not far from it, Old Riley, the loyal horse that had pulled that sleigh, and much else, for a quarter century. Donnie arrives on a Sunday and is due to leave on Thursday. But Wednesday night, the nor¿easter blows in and the farm is buried in two feet of snow. The road is unplowed; the car is useless. Will Donnie make it to the station in time to catch the train back to Boston?All this never happened. Donald Hall never did spend a childhood Christmas at Eagle Pond. But he knew all the stories from his mother and his grandparents and, now in his eighties, and having lived in that same house of his grandparents since 1975, he is in the perfect position to give himself ¿the thing I most wanted, a childhood Christmas at Eagle Pond.¿

Donald Hall's remarkable life in poetry ? a career capped by his appointment as U.S. poet laureate in 2006 ? comes alive in this richly detailed, self-revealing memoir.Hall's invaluable record of the making of a poet begins with his childhood in Depression-era suburban Connecticut, where he first realized poetry was ?secret, dangerous, wicked, and delicious,? and ends with what he calls ?the planet of antiquity,? a time of life dramatically punctuated by his appointment as poet laureate of the United States. Hall writes eloquently of the poetry and books that moved and formed him as a child and young man, and of adolescent efforts at poetry writing ? an endeavor he wryly describes as more hormonal than artistic. His painful formative days at Exeter, where he was sent like a naive lamb to a high WASP academic slaughter, are followed by a poetic self-liberation of sorts at Harvard. Here he rubs elbows with Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Edward Gorey, and begins lifelong friendships with Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, and George Plimpton. After Harvard, Hall is off to Oxford, where the high spirits and rampant poetry careerism of the postwar university scene are brilliantly captured. At eighty, Hall is as painstakingly honest about his failures and low points as a poet, writer, lover, and father as he is about his successes, making Unpacking the Boxes ? his first book since being named poet laureate ? both revelatory and tremendously poignant.

In this companion to the bestselling Lucy's Christmas, award-winning poet Hall and acclaimed illustrator McCurdy recreate the memorable summer of 1910 in the life of young Lucy Wells. McCurdy's beautiful scratchboard illustrations evoke the splendid realities of times past. Full color.

Share an old-fashioned New England Christmas with your children¿back to a time when making the presents was far more satisfying than buying them.Lucy Wells likes planning ahead. In her quaint New England town the leaves have just begun to change, but Lucy is already thinking of Christmas. She begins to make presents for her family: a pincushion for her mother, a doll for her sister, and a pen-wiper for her best friend. For the whole family, her parents have ordered a new modern range stove. The days grow colder and shorter, the snow grows deeper, and everyone grows more excited. Finally, the day arrives Lucy and her family travel to the South Danbury Church on Christmas to exchange gifts, sing carols with the whole town, and perform in the Christmas pageant.Poet laureate Donald Hall (author of The Ox-Cart Man and the companion to this book, Lucy¿s Summer) grew up spending as much time as he could on his grandfather¿s farm in rural New Hampshire. It was there he milked cows, raised sheep, and heard stories about Christmases past that are brought to life in this read-aloud picture book for young children.

This original paperback brings together for the first time all of Donald Hall's writing on Eagle Pond Farm, his ancestral home in New Hampshire, where he visited his grandparents as a young boy and then lived with his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, until her death. It includes the entire, previously published Seasons at Eagle Pond and Here at Eagle Pond; the poem ?Daylilies on the Hill? from The Painted Bed; and several uncollected pieces. In these tender essays, Hall tells of the joys and quiddities of life on the farm, the pleasures and discomforts of a world in which the year has four seasons -- maple sugar, blackfly, Red Sox, and winter. Lyrical, comic, and elegaic, they sing of a landscape and culture that are disappearing under the assault of change.

A candid memoir of love, art, and grief from a celebrated man of letters, United States poet laureate Donald HallIn an intimate record of his twenty-three-year marriage to poet Jane Kenyon, Donald Hall recounts the rich pleasures and the unforeseen trials of their shared life. The couple made a home at their New England farmhouse, where they rejoiced in rituals of writing, gardening, caring for pets, and connecting with their rural community through friends and church. The Best Day the Worst Day presents a portrait of the inner moods of "the best marriage I know about," as Hall has written, against the stark medical emergency of Jane's leukemia, which ended her life in fifteen months. Between recollections of better times, Hall shares with readers the daily ordeal of Jane's dying through heartbreaking but ultimately inspiring storytelling.

A contemplative selection of twelve short stories from the celebrated author Donald Hall, Willow Temple focuses on the effects of divorce, adultery, and neglect. Hall's stories are reminiscent of those of Alice Munro and William Maxwell in their mastery of form and their ability to trace the emotional fault lines connecting generations. "From Willow Temple" is the indelible story of a child's witness of her mother's adultery and the loss that underlies it. Three stories present David Bardo at crucial junctures of his life, beginning as a child drawn to his parents' "cozy adult coven of drunks" and growing into a young man whose intense first affair undergirds a lifelong taste for ardor and betrayal. In this superbly perceptive collection, Hall gives memorable accounts of the passionate weight of lives.

Donald Hall's fourteenth collection opens with an epigraph from the Urdu poet Faiz: "The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved." In that poetic tradition, as in THE PAINTED BED, the beloved might be a person or something else - life itself, or the disappearing countryside. Hall's new poems further the themes of love, death, and mourning so powerfully introduced in his WITHOUT (1998), but from the distance of passed time. A long poem, "Daylilies on the Hill 1975 - 1989," moves back to the happy repossession of the poet's old family house and its history - a structure that "persisted against assaults" as its generations of residents could not. These poems are by turns furious and resigned, spirited and despairing - "mania is melancholy reversed," as Hall writes in another long poem, "Kill the Day." In this book's fourth and final section, "Ardor," the poet moves toward acceptance of new life in old age; eros reemerges.

Now in paperback comes a magnificent anthology that returns to readers the forgotten treasures of American children's poetry. It starts with anonymous Native American verses and spans two centuries of poetry by such luminaries as Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, T.S. Eliot, and a host of contemporary poets. 75 illustrations, 20 in color.

HERE AT EAGLE POND is Donald Hall's remarkable collection of essays about the permanent and transparent memory of place and of his coming home to Eagle Pond, New Hampshire, where he grew up and returned to live with his wife Jane Kenyon at the age of 45, where he began writing poems at the age of twelve, and where his ancestors made their livings by free-lancing as farmers. In these tender essays, Hall tells of the joys and quiddities of life in the ancestral New Hampshire place formerly worked as a dairy farm by his grandparents; of the comforts and discomforts of a world in which the year has four seasons -- maple sugar, blackfly, Red Sox, and winter. These essays are also Donald Hall's letters to friends, answers to such life-altering questions as: "What would our lives be like, living here at Eagle Pond, in solitude among relics and memories, in a countryside of birches and GMC pickups?" And they are ghost stories as well: vivid descriptions of Hall's intimate connection with the land and with his family past. Most importantly, HERE AT EAGLE POND is Donald Hall's coming home to language.

Donald Hall's poignant and courageous poetry speaks of the death of the magnificent, humorous, and gifted Jane Kenyon. Hall speaks to us all of grief, as a poet lamenting the death of a poet, as a husband mourning the loss of a wife. Without is Hall's greatest and most honorable achievement-his gift and testimony, his lament and his celebration of loss and of love.

This volume contains the finest short poetry Donald Hall has written, poems of landscape and love, of dedication and prophecy, poems that have won thousands of readers, as well as various prizes and honors.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry, this serious, ambitious, and graceful book-length poem is the masterwork of one of America's foremost contemporary poets.

The essays in Fathers Playing Catch with Sons are a wonderful mixture of reminiscence and observation, of baseball and of fathers and sons, of how a game binds people together and bridges generations.In the pantheon of great sports literature, not a few poets have tried their hand at paying tribute to their love affair with the game--Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams among them. This elegant volume collects Donald Hall's prose about sports, concentrating on baseball but extending to basketball, football and Ping-Pong.

Distinguished poet Donald Hall and award-winning artist Barry Moser have teamed up to create a hilarious, affectionate portrait in contrasts of our companions, and often best friends, a cat and a dog. With evocative words and masterful paintings, they delineate the doginess and catlike qualities that everyone will recognize.

Winner of the Caldecott MedalThus begins a lyrical journey through the days and weeks, the months, and the changing seasons in the life of one New Englander and his family. The oxcart man packs his goods - the wool from his sheep, the shawl his wife made, the mittens his daughter knitted, and the linen they wove. He packs the birch brooms his son carved, and even a bag of goose feathers from the barnyard geese.He travels over hills, through valleys, by streams, past farms and villages. At Portsmouth Market he sells his goods, one by one - even his beloved ox. Then, with his pockets full of coins, he wanders through the market, buying provisions for his family, and returns to his home. And the cycle begins again. "Like a pastoral symphony translated into picture book format, the stunning combination of text and illustrations recreates the mood of 19-century rural New England."-The Horn Book

For nearly forty years, Donald Hall has stood in the front rank of American poets. The title poem, an autobiographical sequence, takes Hall from his boyhood to his growing acquaintance with poets--seniors like Robert Frost and contemporaries like Robert Bly. It sees him growing into manhood, fatherhood, grandfatherhood, and a happy second marriage. When his life inevitably moves into vicissitude, even tragedy, he will tell the dreadful truth about himself and the challenges of his time on earth.

This is Donald Hall's most advanced work, extending his poetic reach even beyond his recent volumes. Conflict dominates this book, and conflict unites it. Hall takes poetry as an instrument for revelation, whether in an elegy for a (fictional) contemporary poet, or in the title series of poems, whose form imitates the first book of the Odes of Horace. The book's final section, "Extra Innings," moves with poignancy to questions about the end of the game.

Winner of the Caldecott MedalThus begins a lyrical journey through the days and weeks, the months, and the changing seasons in the life of one New Englander and his family. The oxcart man packs his goods - the wool from his sheep, the shawl his wife made, the mittens his daughter knitted, and the linen they wove. He packs the birch brooms his son carved, and even a bag of goose feathers from the barnyard geese.He travels over hills, through valleys, by streams, past farms and villages. At Portsmouth Market he sells his goods, one by one - even his beloved ox. Then, with his pockets full of coins, he wanders through the market, buying provisions for his family, and returns to his home. And the cycle begins again. "Like a pastoral symphony translated into picture book format, the stunning combination of text and illustrations recreates the mood of 19-century rural New England."-The Horn Book

“Old Poets is an indispensable jewel.”—Washington Post“An astonishing array of encounters...Hall’s observations are shrewd and generous.”—Boston GlobeIntimate portraits of great poets in old age, giving new insight into their work and their lives, and context to the often flawless art created by flawed human beings. The best of themselves endure, and the old poets’ existence and endurance gives readers courage to pursue their own vision. Donald Hall (Essays After Eighty and A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety) knew a great deal about work, about poetry, and about age. Each of those things come together in this unique collection. We hear about Robert Frost as Hall knew him: vain and cruel, a man possessed by guilt. But, as Hall writes, “The poet who survives is the poet to celebrate; the human being who confronts darkness and defeats it is the one to admire. For all his vanity, Robert Frost is admirable: He looked into his desert places, confronted his desire to enter the oblivion of the snowy woods, and drove on.”Hall’s essays are once both intimate portraits and learned treatises. He takes us on a pub crawl through the Welsh countryside with the word-mad Dylan Thomas; to the Faber & Faber office of T. S. Eliot, who had discovered more happiness in age than in youth; to a reading where Robert Frost’s public persona hid the truth; to Brooklyn for lunch with the enigmatic Marianne Moore; and to Italy and for a visit with the notorious Ezra Pound. By the time Hall met them, each poet was, he observed, “old enough to have detached from ongoing poetry, to feel alien to the ambitions of the grandchildren.”Also included are portraits of the poets who taught Hall as a writer: the unfailingly kind Archibald MacLeish and Yvor Winters, from whom he learned the most about poetry. Along the way are observations about many other poets and the literary cultures that sustained them.Contents include: “Vanity, Fame, Love, and Robert Frost,” “Dylan Thomas and Public Suicide,” “Notes on T. S. Eliot,” “Rocks and Whirlpools: Archibald MacLeish and Yvor Winters,” “Marianne Moore: Valiant and Alien,” and “Fragments of Ezra Pound.”For lovers of literature, this is a gorgeous remembrance and likely to compel an immediate visit to the poetry section of the nearest bookstore—as Hall writes, “Their presences have been emblems in my life, and I remember these poets as if I kept them carved in stone.”

Donald Hall has lived a remarkable life of letters, one capped most recently by the New York Times bestseller Essays After Eighty, a "treasure" of a book in which he "balance[s] frankness about losses with humor and gratitude" (Washington Post).

One of America's finest poets joins forces with one of baseball's most outrageous pitchers to paint a revealing portrait of our national game. Donald Hall's forceful, yet elegant, prose brings together all the elements of Dock Ellis's story into a seamless whole.  The two of them, the pitcher and the poet, give us remarkable insight into the customs and culture of this closed clannish world.  Dock's keen vision, filtered through Hall's extraordinary voice, shows us the hardships and problems of the thinking athlete in an unthinking world.

Companion volume to: The Oxford book of children's verse.