The Back Chamber
Poems
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- $119.00
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- $119.00
Descripción editorial
The former US poet laureate has crafted poems full of “unexpected insights, charms, droll observations, self-mockery, and well-earned wisdom” (Rain Taxi).
In The Back Chamber, Donald Hall illuminates the evocative, iconic objects of deep memory—a cowbell, a white stone perfectly round, a three-legged milking stool—that serve to foreground the rich meditations on time and mortality that run through this remarkable collection. While Hall’s devoted readers will recognize many of his long-standing preoccupations—baseball, the family farm, love, sex, and friendship—what will strike them as new is the fierce, pitiless poignancy he reveals as his own life’s end comes into view. The Back Chamber is far from being death-haunted, but rather is lively, irreverent, erotic, hilarious, ironic, and sly—full of the life-affirming energy that has made Donald Hall one of America’s most popular and enduring poets.
“For the reader boiling in triple-digit SoCal heat at the end of the summer, Donald Hall’s The Back Chamber: Poems arrives like a sudden cloudburst and shower of cooling rain . . . A former U.S. poet laureate, Hall has always had this elemental power—to vividly evoke his particular New England climate and geography so that it can’t be mistaken for any other—but what is more unexpected in this new collection of poems, his 16th, is passion.” —Los Angeles Times
“The former U.S. poet laureate reaches his 20th book in unmistakably honest form, aggressively plain and unfailingly open about sex, old age, suicide, recovery, the friendship of poets, the business of poetry, dogs, New Hampshire, and baseball.” —Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The former U.S. poet laureate reaches his 20th book in unmistakably honest form, aggressively plain and unfailingly open about sex, old age, suicide, recovery, the friendship of poets, the business of poetry, dogs, New Hampshire, and baseball. Some of Hall's best-known books mourn his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, whose absence grieves him here again. More prominent, though, are the poems about sex some erotic, some comic, all frank, and intent on the ironies that attend lust in old age. A long and underwhelming narrative poem, "Ric's Progress," occupies the middle of the volume; Hall follows the courtship, marriage, and adulteries of a predictable, slightly Updikeish everyman, leavening his errant ways with grim wisdom "we divorce for the same reasons that we marry,/ and we seduce the executioner when we desire/ to be hanged." More vivid and durable are the short poems about old age, old friends, sad memories, and younger versions of Hall himself. "Meatloaf" finds Hall "counting nine syllables on fingers/ discolored by old age and felt pens"; "Closing" remembers the poet and critic Liam Rector, while "The Offspring" imagines the grief of "an adolescent who was not here," the child that Hall and Kenyon could not have.
