RIP Donald Hall (1928-2018)

Over the weekend we were saddened to hear of the death of Donald Hall, a former poet laureate and a central presence in American poetry for over half a century. The New York Times reports:

Donald Hall, a former poet laureate of the United States who found a universe of meaning in the apples, ox carts and ordinary folk of his beloved rural New England, died on Saturday at his home in Wilmot, N.H. He was 89.

His death was announced by his literary agent, Wendy Strothman. He had overcome cancer, first diagnosed in 1989, beating the very odds of survival that he had given himself years ago.

More about Hall's life and work:

He was a staggeringly prolific writer who chose freelance work over teaching — a decision, as [Billy] Collins put it, “to detach himself from academic life, with its slow but steady intravenous drip of a salary.”

Mr. Hall was a memoirist, an essayist and the author of textbooks and children’s books. A lifelong Boston Red Sox fan, he wrote two books about baseball, including “Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball” (1976), a lyrical portrait of both the game and the subject that was written with Mr. Ellis, a flamboyant former pitcher for the Pirates and Yankees. (“In the country of baseball,” Mr. Hall wrote, “time is the air we breathe, and the wind swirls us backward and forward, until we seem so reckoned in time and seasons that all time and all seasons become the same.”)

For 23 years Mr. Hall was married to the poet Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995, and he paid moving tribute to her and their marriage in the collections “Without” (1998) and “The Painted Bed” (2002).

But the bulk of his poetry over a 60-year career emphasizes the cycle of life as it plays out in the natural world and those who live in it, though often in a way with which urban readers could identify.

Hall was a long-time and frequent contributor to Poetry, beginning in the 1950s and publishing poetry in each decade thereafter. Please head here to read his work and remember his life.