Donald Hall, New U.S. Poet Laureate
Categories: In the News , Poetry
Seventy-seven-year-old Donald Hall has been named the U.S.'s fourteenth poet laureate, succeeding Ted Kooser, who held the position since 2004. While the position holds no specific duties or requirements, most poets have used the job, which pays $35,000 a year, to advance the cause of poetry among a population that sometimes seems to find contemporary poetry increasingly irrelevant to their lives.
Hall is known for being very outspoken about politics and the arts, and as a very prolific poet, having published 19 collections of poetry and 22 collections of prose over the course of the last 60 years, as well as plays and books for children. His most recent collection is White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006. In part because he has lived in rural New Hampshire for most of his life, he is often compared to Robert Frost, and his poetry certainly reflects a sense of place. "Ox-Cart Man," for example, begins" In October of the year / he counts potatoes dug from the brown field / counting the seed, counting / the cellar's portion out / and bags the rest on the cart's floor.
Recent poems are often about his wife, poet Jane Kenyon, who died of leukemia in 1995, and about his own aging. Here are some lines from Hall's 2002 "Affirmation."
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she can't withstand.
More books in the library's collection by Donald Hall:
The Best Day and the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon
Breakfast Served Any Time All Day : Essays on Poetry New and Selected
Willow Temple : New & Selected Stories
