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Wednesday, June 14, 2006

"I would like to include more poetry of the 17th century."

Our long national Kooser is over. Donald Hall is the new poet laureate. And though his poetry sometimes drifts into indifferent prose, it is for the most part good, and sometimes very good.

And when asked what sort of poetry he’d like to champion as laureate, Donald Hall says things like “I would like to include more poetry of the 17th century.”



The work of his I know best is Without, a spare, wounded account of his wife’s death from leukemia (she was Jane Kenyon, also a fine poet). The peril of raw, of-the-moment narratives of personal loss, as in Paul Monette’s unsuccessful Love Alone, is that the onrush of emotion leaves little metaphor or worked theme in its wake. Without has some of this problem.

But often it rises above the riot of feeling to produce glorious lines:

You know now
whether the soul survives death.
Or you don’t. When you were dying
you said you didn’t fear
punishment. We never dared
to speak of Paradise.

At five A.M., when I walk outside,
mist lies thick on hayfields.
By eight the air is clear,
cool, sunny with the pale yellow
light of mid-May. Kearsarge
rises huge and distinct,
each birch and balsam visible.
To the west the waters
of Eagle Pond waver
and flash through popples just
leafing out.

Always the weather,
writing its book of the world,
returns you to me.
Ordinary days were best,
When we worked over poems
in our separate rooms.
I remember watching you gaze
out the January window
into the garden of snow
and ice, your face rapt
as you imagined burgundy lilies.