You might expect the fact of dying--the dying of a beloved wife and fellow poet--to make for a bleak and lonely tale. But Donald Hall's poignant and courageous poetry, facing that dread fact, involves us all: the magnificent, humorous, and gifted woman, Jane Kenyon, who suffered and died; the doctors and nurses who tried but failed to save her; the neighbors, friends, and relatives who grieved for her; the husband who sat by her while she lived and afterward sat in their house alone with his pain, self-pity, and fury; and those of us who till now had nothing to do with it. As Donald Hall writes, "Remembered happiness is agony; so is remembered agony." Without will touch every feeling reader, for everyone has suffered loss and requires the fellowship of elegy. In the earth's oldest poem, when Gilgamesh howls of the death of Enkidu, a grieving reader of our own time may feel a kinship, across the abyss of four thousand years, with a Sumerian king. In Without Donald 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 give and testimony, his lament and his celebration of loss and of love.
About the Author :
DONALD HALL, poet laureate of the United States from 2006 to 2007, is author of String Too Short to Be Saved and more than a dozen other works of prose and poetry. His many awards include the National Medal of Arts, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry, and the 1990 Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Review :
"Hall's extraordinarily clear awareness of what is over and gone is more present and more appealing in words now than it could have found room to be in life.... It is as if they were not poems at all but experiences undergone with and by another human being." - New York Review of Books
"As riveting a poetic narrative as has come along in some time. Hall's melancholy deathwatch contains gripping dramatic interest as well as excellent poetry, with its unusually intimate focus on the painful process of losing a loved one to a prolonged wasting illness and then trying, somehow, to get over it." - San Francisco Chronicle
"Mr. Hall's poems on the death of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, are direct, devoid of obvious poetic devices, dependent on ordinary words and the patterns of the speaking voice. That voice, however, is extraordinarily moving as it evokes helplessness amid the tangle of medical equipment, the pain of watching a loved partner die, the feel of a house where "Your presence ... is almost as enormous / and painful as your absence." - The Atlantic
