Synopses & Reviews
Affirmation< br=""> < br=""> To grow old is to lose everything.< br=""> Aging, everybody knows it.< br=""> Even when we are young, < br=""> we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads< br=""> when a grandfather dies.< br=""> Then we row for years on the midsummer< br=""> pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage, < br=""> that began without harm, scatters< br=""> into debris on the shore, < br=""> and a friend from school drops< br=""> cold on a rocky strand.< br=""> If a new love carries us< br=""> past middle age, our wife will die< br=""> at her strongest and most beautiful.< br=""> New women come and go. All go.< br=""> The pretty lover who announces< br=""> that she is temporary< br=""> is temporary. The bold woman, < br=""> middle-aged against our old age, < br=""> sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.< br=""> Another friend of decades estranges himself< br=""> in words that pollute thirty years.< br=""> Let us stifle under mud at the pond& #39; s edge< br=""> and affirm that it is fitting< br=""> and delicious to lose everything.
Synopsis
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 on the Hill 1975 - 1989, moves back to the happy repossession of the poet's old family house and its history - a structure that persisted against assaults as its generations of residents could not. These poems are by turns furious and resigned, spirited and despairing - mania is melancholy reversed, as Hall writes in another long poem, Kill the Day. In this book's fourth and final section, Ardor, the poet moves toward acceptance of new life in old age; eros reemerges.
Synopsis
Affirmation
To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage, that began without harm, scatters into debris on the shore, and a friend from school drops cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us past middle age, our wife will die at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces that she is temporary is temporary. The bold woman, middle-aged against our old age, sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the ponds edge and affirm that it is fitting and delicious to lose everything.
About the Author
'Donald Hall is the fourteenth poet laureate of the United States and the authorof more than two dozen books of poems and prose, including White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 19462006. His work has garnered many honors, among them the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry for The One Day; the Lenore Marshall Award for The Happy Man; the Robert Frost Silver Medal from the Poetry Society of America for Old and New Poems; and the prestigious Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in recognition of his lifetime accomplishments. His poetry collection Without, which was written for Jane Kenyon during and after her illness, received the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Hall continues to inhabit the New Hampshire farmhouse where he and Jane Kenyon lived together.'