Review: 'Essays After 80,' by Donald Hall

The death of Galway Kinnell last month leaves Donald Hall, 86, as one of the few members of a generation of poets that emerged in the 1950s. These poets were formalists in the tradition of Robert Frost, influenced by the turbulence of the following decades, socially engaged in subject and experimental in form.

After his 2006 book, "White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems," Hall announced that "poetry abandoned me" and turned his concentration to prose. The result is "Essays After Eighty," a mix of autobiography and reflection as he grew more incapacitated by old age and illness.

He wrote these pieces in Eagle Pond Farm, a family farmhouse in New Hampshire where he seems confined to live out his days as the glow of his long and honored career dims.

Hall became U.S. poet laureate in 2006, a ceremonial appointment with few responsibilities. The position was a bully pulpit for younger, energetic people such as Robert Pinsky and Rita Dove, who served several terms distinguished by their activism. But Hall was 78 when he received the honor and described his tenure as "useless."

It's one of numerous references he makes to his physical decline in these 14 essays, straining to avoid self-pity and resentment, but both simmer beneath the surface. In his heyday, Hall enjoyed attention from his busy poetry-reading schedule and could become prickly when he didn't get it.

"Thank You Thank You" recounts his days on the reading circuit as his generation of poets spent more and more time doing public appearances for good fees than their predecessors.

This essay is more than a reminiscence but one of his few discourses on his art in the book as he explains how reading a poem out loud creates new challenges for the poet. "A poem must work from the platform, but it must work on the page," he explains.

He makes catty remarks about his fellow poets, or in Rod McKuen's case, pretenders, and an unnamed fellow who sounds a lot like Billy Collins whose income is unusually high for a bard.

"Instead of money," Hall points out, "poetry hopes to create beauty, emotion, intelligence, insight and pleasure all at once, as well as immortality."

Hall now seeks his immortality in these essays as he struggles to balance a life he once lived to the full with days when his first nap is at 9:30 a.m. "Essays After Eighty" is not an endorsement for the so-called comforts of old age, but a call to rely on the mind and the soul in the face of decline.

Bob Hoover is the retired book editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.