The New Yorker's Decades of Publishing Donald Hall

The New Yorker shares poems, essays, and stories that Donald Hall published in the magazine over the past six decades, starting with his earliest poems in 1954, which would "propose themes and attitudes that would continue to compel him throughout his career," as Hannah Aizenman writes. Hall's subjects were often influenced by events in his life, such as the death of his wife Jane Kenyon in 1995, and his later contributions were not so different:

Hall’s late prose—including “Out the Window,” from 2012, which he discussed with Blake Eskin for the Out Loud podcast—is acutely observed, musing and fresh; in his reflections on poetry readings, personal grooming, and culinary pleasures, humor and sorrow keep close quarters, often overlapping. “Between Solitude and Loneliness” considers the protean qualities of Hall’s isolation—first as an only child, then as a writer, as a widower, and as a near-nonagenarian—along with its interruptions, particularly his happy marriage to Kenyon. “The Poetry of Death,” from 2017, was Hall’s final contribution to The New Yorker. The essay is a moving meditation on elegy—its history and its purposes—as well as the author’s relationship with mortality; Hall concludes by recalling how “after her death, Jane’s voice and mine rose as one, spiralling together the images and diphthongs of the dead who were once the living, our necropoetics of grief and love in the singular absence of flesh.” It’s a fitting last line for a poet who, from the beginning, found inspiration in the anticipation of loss and the act of memory, and who focussed his attentions on the contradiction, the conflict, and, ultimately, the intimate companionship between life and death.

Find all of it at the New Yorker.