…up there with the best things [Hall] did…[A Carnival of Losses has] flat-footed gravitas, a vestigial sort of swat that calls to mind Johnny Cash's stark final records with the producer Rick Rubin…[It's] good enough to make clear that Hall did not live past his sell-by date as a writer.

★ 04/16/2018
Former U.S. poet laureate (2006–2007), Hall reflects on aging and death in this candid and often humorous memoir. Hall meanders over mundane losses in his life—the demise of mill towns, the root cellar in his New Hampshire home—as well as the death of his wife, poet Jane Kenyon, 20 years ago, and the poets he has known. In a meditative opening, Hall says about aging, “you are old when the waiter doesn’t mention that you are holding the menu upside down,” and notes that “in your eighties you take two naps a day. Nearing ninety you don’t count the number of naps.” He reminisces about various poets he’s known: James Dickey was “the best liar I ever knew”; Allen Tate “always looked grumpy”; James Wright was always passionate about literature. Hall no longer writes poetry or essays, but prefers to write about his life and experiences and “tell short anecdotes.... why should the nonagenarian hold anything back?” In the longest section, “Necropoetics,” Hall bares his grief during his wife’s prolonged death from cancer, recognizing how much her voice still lives in his own, “spiraling together images and diphthongs of the dead who were once the living, our necropoetics of grief and love in the unforgivable absence of flesh.” Hall’s ruminative and detailed reflections on life make this a fantastic follow-up to his Essays After Eighty. (July)

Hall lived long enough to leave behind two final books, memento mori titled ‘Essays After Eighty’ (2014) and now ‘A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety.’ They’re up there with the best things he did.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times “Donald Hall writes about love and loss and art and home in a manner so essential and direct it’s as if he’s put the full force of his life on the page. There are very few perfect books and A Carnival of Losses is one of them.”—Ann Patchett “A freewheeling essay collection that’s a fitting coda to a distinguished career . . . Hall may have reached his roundhouse but not before bequeathing readers with this moving valedictory gift.” —Washington Post “It's a beauty, brimming with stories, confessions and faded snapshots in time in which he muses about life, settles a few scores and brags a little about his accomplishments . . . It’s odd that a book whose subject is loss could be so uplifting. And yet it is. Hall may be telling us what it’s like to fall apart, but he does it so calmly, and with such wit and exactitude, that you can’t help but shake your head in wonder.” —Ann Levin, Associated Press “A joy to read.” —BookPage “It’s a heartbreaking beauty of a book.” —Bookish “Hall’s ruminative and detailed reflections on life make this a fantastic follow-up to his Essays After Eighty.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “A joyful, wistful celebration of poetry, poets, and a poet’s life . . . There’s much to enjoy in these exuberant 'notes.'” —Kirkus Reviews —

2018-03-19
A joyful, wistful celebration of poetry, poets, and a poet's life.Personal matters that former poet laureate Hall wrote about in Essays After Eighty (2014, etc.) pop up again, this time with a greater sense of urgency: "As I write toward my nineties I shed my skin. I tell short anecdotes, I hazard an opinion, speculate, assume, and remember. Why should the nonagenarian hold anything back?" In the book's fourth section, "A Carnival of Losses," the author returns to stories about his New Hampshire life, relatives, friends, his appearances on Garrison Keillor's radio show (where once—off air—they traded dirty limericks, watching baseball, and interviewing Boris Karloff in high school. Also included here is his somber and poignant New Yorker piece, "Necropoetics," largely about his wife, poet and translator Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995. "Poetry begins with elegy," he writes, as he ruminates on the subject. Poetasters will enjoy his "The Selected Poets of Donald Hall" section, pithy, sharp, and gossipy profiles and anecdotes about poets he has known and met, some slight—e.g., "my recollections of some poets are brief. Allen Tate always looked grumpy." These are countered by those Hall loved, like Robert Creeley, Theodore Roethke, Seamus Heaney, and James Wright. Then there's James Dickey, the "best liar I ever knew," and Tom Clark, the "best student I ever had." Hall's admiring piece on Richard Wilbur includes a short, insightful passage on prosody in Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress." The book's first section, "Notes Nearing Ninety," shows off Hall's humor and wit, as in "The Vaper," about how vaping helped him quit smoking (mostly), "The Last Poem," about the only time he expressed his politics in a newspaper ("it went bacterial"), and a piece about frequently losing his teeth—literally.There's much to enjoy in these exuberant "notes."