On Eagle Pond - Softcover

Donald Hall was the fourteenth poet laureate of the United States and the author of more than two dozen books of poems and prose, including White and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006. His work has garnered many honors, among them the National Book Critics Cirlce Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Hall continued to inhabit the New Hampshire farmhouse where he and Jane Kenyon lived together.

In celebration of New England and the seasons, the poet laureate of New Hampshire records his love of place. The place is a 180-year-old farmland, Eagle Pond, the home of Hall's grandparents and now his home. "There's no reason to live here except for love," writes Hall as he describes the sight of huge Holsteins frolicking or, when impatient for the arrival of spring, he suggests pushing winter "off to a condominium in the keys of Antarctica." This collection of four essays by a close observer of the natural world is a blend of reminiscences, anecdotes and vignettes that capture continuity of family and the quiet delights of rural life in each season. --Publishers Weekly

Hall gives us an intimate sketch of his beloved New Hampshire, where he summered with his grandparents at their homestead on Eagle Pond in Danbury: "By the time I was sixteen I daydreamed of living here as a writer; in my twenties I learned that this was impractical; in my forties I did it." All four essays lucidly entwine Hall's past and present lives. Unfortunately, they are self-consciously nostalgic and therefore somewhat oppressive; perhaps because this was the season of Hall's childhood, "Summer" is the best realized. Still, this provides yet another backdrop against which we may examine Hall's poetry, his fiction, and his plays --Library Journal