Dwight Garner Reviews A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety

At the New York Times, Dwight Garner reviews Donald Hall's first posthumously published book, A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety. Hall died last month at the age of 89. Hall's verse, in Garner's words, "had a homely, bucolic, beans-on-the-woodstove quality. He was more cabbage than tulip." Picking up from there: 

To borrow an analogy from baseball, a sport he loved, he was the sort of batter who got on base thanks to walks, bunts, bloopers into right field and a good deal of hustle. He was a plugger.

His poems were pleasant to hear read aloud. He was a frequent guest on Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion,” where he was never a Nebuchadnezzar-like destroyer of the peace. He made a memorable appearance on “This American Life,” reading a poem about his second wife, Jane Kenyon, who died of leukemia in 1995 at 47. Toward the end of his life, with his bushy beard and high forehead and rumpled sense of rectitude, Hall resembled Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as drawn by Edward Koren.

Hall, who was poet laureate from 2006 to 2007, was stupefyingly productive. He left behind more than 20 books of poems, a dozen or more children’s books, a few plays, two volumes of short stories, textbooks, anthologies, clusters of memoirs and books of essays. One got the impression that, after a long day at his desk, he walked outside and urinated a few final poems into the snow banks around his New Hampshire farm.

Hall lived long enough to leave behind two final books, memento mori titled “Essays After Eighty” (2014) and now “A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety.” They’re up there with the best things he did. He apparently managed to sidestep a rendezvous with dementia, and seemed to suffer only mildly at the end from what Christopher Hitchens, quoting a friend, termed CRAFT syndrome, printable here as Can’t Remember a Fizzling Thing. These books have flat-footed gravitas, a vestigial sort of swat that calls to mind Johnny Cash’s stark final records with the producer Rick Rubin.

Read on at the New York Times.