Donald Hall
Donald Hall
Donald Andrew Hall, Jr., known as Donald Hall is an American poet, writer, editor and literary critic...
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth20 September 1928
CityHamden, CT
men years shining
We made in those days tiny identical rooms inside our bodies which the men who uncover our graves will find in a thousand years shining and whole.
moving home years
Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don't let them go, don't publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you; by that time, you ought to have them right.
years ignorant grandfather
To grow old is to lose everything. Aging, everybody knows it. Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies. Then we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content.
drives fear
Fear is what drives me to your demise.
finished
I think I'm probably finished writing about it now,
among built owned pew structure
My great-great-grandparents owned the back pew and they were among those who built the structure back in the 1800s,
months three aviation
Can build plane... Delivery about three months.
horse sea glasses
Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.
horse autumn winter
For a hundred and fifty years, in the pasture of dead horses, roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs, yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter frost heaved your bones in the ground--old toilers, soil makers: O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.
grief loss wish
I wish you were that birch rising from the clump behind you, and I the gray oak alongside.
baseball past glasses
For most baseball fans, maybe oldest is always best. We love baseball because it seizes and retains the past, like the snowy village inside a glass paperweight.
important done found
Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.
art philosophy history
Less is more, in prose as in architecture.
kindness eye bullets
The greatest kindness would put a bullet in his bright eye.