The Selected Poems of Donald Hall

Book excerpt: The former U.S. poet laureate presents the essential work from across his long and celebrated career in this sweeping collection. For decades, Donald Hall produced a body of work that established him as one of America’s most significant—and beloved—poets of his generation. Celebrated for his plainspoken yet evocative imagery and his stirring explorations of bucolic life, Hall won numerous awards, including the Robert Frost Medal, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the National Medal of Arts. When Hall reached his eighties, his health began to decline, and he announced that the ability to write poems has “abandoned” him. Looking back over his astonishingly rich body of work, Hall hand-picked his finest and most memorable poems for this final, concise, and essential volume.