Volume 53, Number 19 · November 30, 2006
The Elegist
By Charles Simic
White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems, 1946–2006
by Donald Hall, with a CD of poems read by the author
Houghton Mifflin, 431 pp., $30.00
Donald Hall, who has just become the fourteenth poet laureate of the United States, has been called, and rightly in my view, one of our preeminent men of letters. The range of his published works is truly astonishing. There are fifteen books of poetry and twenty-two books of prose, including short stories, collections of literary essays, sports journalism, memoirs, children's books, and plays, not counting dozens of textbooks and anthologies that he has edited over the years. In an interview, he explained his various interests by saying that he was curious to explore all sort of genres and acquire some competence in a number of them. There was an additional reason too. After he abruptly quit teaching at the University of Michigan in 1975 and moved with his second wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, to his grandmother's house in New Hampshire, he had to support himself. Whatever the spur, the books he wrote, most of which are in print, are still very much worth reading. Hall is a lively prose writer, a master of the informal essay, a raconteur, and a charmer able to be both informative and hugely entertaining, whatever his topic happens to be.
Review, 4206 words
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