This volume collects some of Donald Hall's finest short poetry written between 1947 and 1990. Here are poems of landscape and love, of dedication and prophecy.

Donald Hall's remarkable life in poetry - a career capped by his appointment as U.S. poet laureate in 2006 - comes alive in this richly detailed, self-revealing memoir. Hall's invaluable record of the making of a poet begins with his childhood in Depression-era suburban Connecticut, where he first realized poetry was "secret, dangerous, wicked, and delicious," and ends with what he calls "the planet of antiquity," a time of life dramatically punctuated...

Donald Hall's fourteenth collection opens with an epigraph from the Urdu poet Faiz: "The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved." In that poetic tradition, as in The Painted Bed, the beloved might be a person or something else, life itself, or the disappearing countryside. Hall's new poems further the themes of love, death, and mourning so powerfully introduced in his Without (1998), but from the distance of passed time. A long poem, "Daylilies...

This is Donald Hall's most advanced work, extending his poetic reach even beyond his recent volumes. Conflict dominates this book, and conflict unites it. Hall takes poetry as an instrument for revelation, whether in an elegy for a (fictional) contemporary poet, or in the title series of poems, whose form imitates the first book of the Odes of Horace. The book's final section, "Extra Innings," moves with poignancy to questions about the end of the...

A contemplative selection of twelve short stories from the celebrated author Donald Hall, Willow Temple focuses on the effects of divorce, adultery, and neglect. Hall's stories are reminiscent of those of Alice Munro and William Maxwell in their mastery of form and their ability to trace the emotional fault lines connecting generations. "From Willow Temple" is the indelible story of a child's witness of her mother's adultery and the loss that underlies...

Intimate portraits of great poets in old age, giving new insight into their work and their lives, and context to the often-flawless art created by flawed human beings. The best of themselves endure, and the old poets' existence and endurance gives readers courage to pursue their own vision. Donald Hall (Essays After Eighty and A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety) knew a great deal about work, about poetry, and about age. Each of those things...

In the pantheon of great sports literature, not a few poets have tried their hand at paying tribute to their love affair with the game, Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams among them. This elegant volume collects Donald Hall's prose about sports, concentrating on baseball but extending to basketball, football and Ping-Pong. The essays are a wonderful mixture of reminiscence and observation, of baseball and of fathers and sons,...

Author of more than thirty books of poetry and prose, Donald Hall performs here dozens of his best-loved poems, together with excerpts from six of his works of prose. Donald Hall has been writing poems for over fifty years and now stands as one of America's foremost poets. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Robert Frost Medal of the Poetry Society of America, the New England Book Award for nonfiction, and former Poet Laureate of...

A dog and a cat take turns explaining what is wonderful about being who they are.