White Apples and the Taste of Stone
Selected Poems 1946–2006
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Publisher Description
This retrospective collection of verse from the former US poet laureate and National Medal of Arts winner spans six decades of celebrated work.
Throughout his writing life Donald Hall has garnered numerous accolades and honors, culminating in 2006 with his appointment as poet laureate of the United States. White Apples and the Taste of Stone collects more than two hundred poems from across sixty years of Hall’s celebrated career, and includes poems published in The New Yorker, the American Poetry Review, and the New York Times.
Those who have come to love Donald Hall's poetry will welcome this vital and important addition to his body of work. For the uninitiated it is a spectacular introduction to this critically acclaimed and admired poet.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hall's 60 years of much-honored work have made him an elder statesman among American poets and a much-honored exponent of the clear, plain style: this career retrospective (the first since 1990) finds room for all his strengths. Given to formal short work in the '50s, to lengthy verse essays and verse memoirs later on, Hall shows consistent topics and moods: adult life among New Hampshire's farms and mountains, childhood in the Connecticut suburbs, equanimity and nostalgia, satire and self-satire, middle age and old age, regret and reserve. Most original in his long poems from the '80s and '90s, Hall achieved popular success in recent years, in Without (1998) and The Painted Bed (2002), collecting elegies and laments for his late wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, whose life he chronicled in the prose memoir The Best Day the Worst Day (2005). In a month overcrowded with poetry releases, Hall's long-eminent reputation, and the persistent interest in Kenyon, should combine to help this book stand out.
