Life Work
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
The revered American Poet Laureate reflects on the meaning of work, solitude, and love with “extraordinary nobility and wisdom” (The New York Times)
When Donald Hall moved to his grandparents’ New Hampshire farm in 1975, his work as a writer and a life devoted to the literary arts must have seemed remote from the harsh physical labor of his ancestors. However, he reveals a similar kind of artistry in the lives of his grandparents, Kate and Wesley. From them, he learned that the devotion to craft—be it canning vegetables, writing poems, or carting manure—creates its own special discipline and an ‘absorbedness’ that no wage can compensate.
In this “sustained meditation on work as the key to personal happiness” (Los Angeles Times), we see how the writer has modeled his own life on his family’s lives of work, solitude, and love. When Hall comes face to face with his own mortality halfway through writing this book, we understand both his obsession with work and its ultimate consolation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hall, winner of the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award for his poetry ( The One Day ), and the author of children's books ( The Ox-Cart Man ), memoirs and a collection of biographies of poets ( Their Ancient Glittering Eyes ), here offers a meditative look at his life as a writer in a spare and beautifully crafted memoir. Devoted to his art, Hall can barely wait for the sun to rise each morning so that he can begin the task of shaping words. His discovery that a supposedly arrested cancer has now metastasized to his liver drives him to write with even greater urgency and to reflect on the gift of ``absorbedness'' in work that was given to him in his boyhood by his farmer grandfather. Complementing his passion for writing is the love he and his wife feel for each other; a love which enables him to face a liver operation--undergone during the writing of this book--and the possibility of imminent death with courage and hope. 25,000 first printing; major ad/promo; first serial to the New York Times Sunday Magazine; author tour.
