Donald Hall in his blue chair.
Aram Boghosian / Boston Globe / Getty
They describe 'Donald Hall, one of the great formalist poets .... [who] wrote scores of works. He was a talented playwright, a superb memoirist, and an omnicompetent anthologist.
.....there is little recondite and nothing pretentious about Hall’s poems.'
We see that in this text:
'Snow fell in the night.
At five-fifteen I woke to a bluish
mounded softness where
the Honda was. Cat fed and coffee made,
I broomed snow off the car
and drove to the Kearsarge Mini-Mart
before Amy opened
to yank my Globe out of the bundle.
'Back, I set my cup of coffee
beside Jane, still half-asleep,
murmuring stuporous
thanks in the aquamarine morning.
'Then I sat in my blue chair
with blueberry bagels and strong
black coffee reading news,
the obits, the comics, and the sports.
Carrying my cup twenty feet,
I sat myself at the desk
for this day’s lifelong
engagement with the one task and desire.'
Hall was nearly 90 when he died. Ann Patchett quotes him about an age which should interest us all:
'However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life.'
A jolly prospect.
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