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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. |