Essays After Eighty by Donald Hall (PDF)

Description

The former U.S. Poet Laureate contemplates life, death, and the view from his window in these “alternately lyrical and laugh-out-loud funny” essays (The New York Times). From an early age, Donald Hall dedicated his life to the written word. In his long and celebrated career, he was an accomplished poet, essayist, memoirist, dramatist, and children’s author. Now, in the “unknown, unanticipated galaxy” of very old age, his essays continue to startle, move, and delight. In Essays After Eighty, Hall ruminates on his past: “thirty was terrifying, forty I never noticed because I was drunk, fifty was best with a total change of life, sixty extended the bliss of fifty . . .” He also addresses his present: “When I turned eighty and rubbed testosterone on my chest, my beard roared like a lion and gained four inches.” Most memorably, Hall writes about his enduring love affair with his ancestral Eagle Pond Farm and with the writing life that sustains him every day: “Yesterday my first nap was at 9:30 a.m., but when I awoke I wrote again.” “Deliciously readable…Donald Hall, if abandoned by the muse of poetry, has wrought his prose to a keen autumnal edge.” —The Wall Street Journal

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Donnie seems to have lost his filter since writing “String too Short to be Saved.”

⭐At eighty-five, the poet Donald Hall has strong vivid opinions about a lot of things and writes about them eloquently in this collection of essays. Some of them are growing a beard (he’s done it three times in his life), smoking, physical exercise (or lack thereof since he only started exercising at eighty out of necessity), divorce (“divorce is always miserable”), dying (“dying sucks.”) No longer writing poetry, Mr. Hall maintains that his now lack of testosterone makes writing poetry, which he describes as a sexual experience, impossible. His life has become simpler. He has given up driving after having had two minor accidents and uses a wheelchair when he goes through airports and visits art galleries (one of his favorite passions). His experience while visiting the National Gallery of Art has gotten a lot of attention thanks in part to an interview with Terry Gross on “Fresh Air.” A guard at the gallery, as Mr. Hall and his companion are leaving, asks him if he had a “‘nice din-din.'” It is too bad that the insensitive “goon” (Mr. Hall’s characterization of him) probably will never read the essay or hear a transcript of the Gross program.Mr. Hall takes lots of naps but obviously still writes prose, eats mostly Stouffer TV dinners and now lives on one floor of the farmhouse in New Hampshire that has been in his family for generations. He does not own a computer and has a television only to watch MSNBC and baseball. If he wants to know what is happening, he gets his information from newspapers and magazines. He is of the opinion that “Apparently Facebook exists to extinguish friendship. E-mail and texting destroy the post office. eBay replaces garage sales. Amazon eviscerates bookstores. Technology speeds, then doubles is speed, then doubles again. Art takes naps.”Mr. Hall is not optimistic that his poetry will endure (Let’s hope he is wrong). And he reminds the reader that poets fall in and out of favor and often then go into oblivion, that the “bulk of Pulitzer Prize winners make a paupers’ graveyard” that dying young was a “successful move by John Keats,” and that more people know about the life of Sylvia Plath than know her poetry.The author has written often about his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, and her diagnosis, sickness and early death in 1995 from leukemia. The most poignant sentence in the entire book has to be: “I will mourn her forever.”These essays, however, are not depressing. Mr. Hall still has both his wits and wit about him and has given an accurate diagnosis of the process of aging. And he lets us know that not everything in old age is grim. He particularly likes boarding planes first because he cannot walk and if is the opinion that “wheelchairs are the way to travel.”Finally a word about the portrait of Mr. Hall by David Mendelsohn on the cover of the book: it is stunning. I suspect a lot of people were drawn to the book because of it.

⭐Insightful about being old; spare and simple in his prose. I’m 81 and he is a comfort, because his body is a Carnival of Losses, but his spirit looks dying in the face and does not quit.

⭐Donald Hall is a man of words, a poet who has mastered prose. He takes on many subjects and life experiences in this short memoir which is an odyssey into the world of the old.He takes on some of his challenges very seriously, like his lack of balance, reliance on a wheel chair and inability to speak with any strength. Other things, he takes a lighter note with as he discusses how age makes him appreciate getting to the bathroom on time and not having to worry about his next orgasm.Ironically, when he was in his sixties, he fought and won a terrible round with colon and liver cancer. At the same time, his beloved wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, was diagnosed with leukemia and died fifteen months later at forty-seven. He still grieves her loss but has a lady friend named Linda with whom he shares a lot of his life.I most enjoyed his discussions about art and artists, the meaning of praise and the sincerity of the praiser. He seems to have hit it on the nose.Donald Hall realizes that his “circles narrow. Each season my balance gets worse, and sometimes I fall. I no longer cook for myself but microwave widower food, mostly Stouffer’s. My fingers are clumsy and slow with buttons.” “Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller and old age is a ceremony of losses.”

⭐BEHOLD, A RAGGED MANLentzian Sonnet Rhyme Sequenceaa, bcbc, dd, efef, ggOn the shanks of Ragged Mountain a poet rages in common diminishment,Writing of paradise lost and donning a riotous beard like a Russian dissident,Echoes of Robert Frost with hard clarity and common sense in his disposition,Gazing from a blue chair, clouds kiss Kearsage as foreplay in a winter storm.A man of many ragged drafts and doyen in the kit of tender composition,Behold, the holy poet’s songs, nicked in granite, disciplined in lyrical form.Raker of hay, Holstein dairyman, poetry man, Red Sox on the radio fan,A Harvard, Oxford and Oxcart Man: behold, the Ragged Mountain Man,Sustained in the shades of summits where his ancestors were homegrown,Prophet of the age to come, bard of back chambers, an inscrutable charmer,A common man, if ever there were one, limning a literary light well shone,Poet of the people: raking and baling verse from the voice of the rustic farmer,Who deem him salt of the earth as New Hampshire confers a common bond,Behold, a ragged man with undimmed eyes peering west toward Eagle Pond.+ + +

⭐I like Donald Hall very much. I had to put this up front. The book, ESSAYS AFTER EIGHTY, is a chunk of Hall’s life. I might say that, as I’m after eighty myself and someone who still dabbles in poetry and still enjoys a poet’s roundtable twice a month, Donald is my kind of poet because he writes plainly about plain living in a New England environment with all of its homespun, old time philosophy of living.He captures that which I still remember having worked on a University farm while married with children at the University of Maine. I might add that the face on this book is worth the purchase because the ruggedness of it with all its creases and crannies and the beard says to me, now, there’s a man; there’s a poet and an essayist. If you have never tasted Hall, try him, and if you have, you might want to read him again, his life, his poetry, chunk by chunk.

⭐A rare piece of writing that manages to be at once poignant, funny, cynical, jaded, and full of schaudenfreude. It has shades of Barne’s ‘The sense of an ending’ and touches of the same themes that permeate Frankl’s ‘Mans’ search for Meaning.’ Hall accomplishes in this end of life memoir what Coetzee sought in Slow Man and Roth attempted in ‘Exit Ghost’. I read this book sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page, episode by episode.

⭐I read the first essay as a sample and bought the Kindle edition on the strength of it. I read the entire book in a six-hour stretch today. I couldn’t put it down. Hall is hilarious, dry, as observant as you might expect a working poet of some 8 decades’ experience to be, and collected. I’d recommend this to anyone as a tonic for our age and the mainstream view of older people.

⭐I liked this book for the reminiscence of a life. I found the way it ended inspirational in that it tells of a life nearing the end but focused on living.

⭐To read and read again. I enjoyed it immensely.

⭐expected more reflection on life and community

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