The Painted Bed
Poems
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The former US poet laureate delivers a book “filled with raw sexual disclosures, rowdy anger and a self-blasting mockery” (The New York Times).
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.
“More controlled, more varied and more powerful, this taut follow-up volume [to Without] reexamines Hall’s grief while exploring the life he has made since. The book’s first poem, ‘Kill the Day,’ stands among the best Hall has ever written.” —Publishers Weekly
“A compelling, sometimes shocking, and certainly deeply moving depiction of bereavement.” —Poetry
“Hall has continued growing as a poet, and his steady readers may consider this his finest collection . . . Bleakness and beauty characterize the reminiscent lyrics that follow, too, joined by a breathtaking bluntness.” —Booklist
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hall has for decades been an eminent poet and critic; his previous book, Without (1999), was a raw collection of elegies for his late wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, that brought attention to their lives and work. More controlled, more varied and more powerful, this taut follow-up volume reexamines Hall's grief while exploring the life he has made since. The book's first poem, "Kill the Day," stands among the best Hall has ever written. It examines mourning in 16 long-lined stanzas, alternating catalogue with aphorism, understatement with keened lament: "How many times will he die in his own lifetime?" Two groups of terse, short-lined free verse proffer stories and moments from Kenyon's last days and from Hall's first days without her: "You think that their/ dying is the worst/ thing that could happen.// Then they stay dead." Subsequent brief stanzaic lyrics take both epigraph and method from Thomas Hardy's poems on the loss of his wife: some will please both Hardy's fans and Hall's. But even those fans may skip "Daylilies on the Hill," a lengthy and overly detailed verse history of the by now familiar New Hampshire house that Hall and Kenyon shared. The book's last poems range from raunchy to wise as they explore sex in later age "Sometimes our red fitted/ sheets maneuvered/ to embrace us like pythons." The final poem, ironically called "Affirmation," contains a more typical and typically stark prediction: "If a new love carries us/ past middle age, our wife will die/ at her strongest and most beautiful."
