The shaping of a literary life

N.H. laureate explores forces behind his work

Former US poet laureate Donald Hall at his home in Wilmot, N.H. (Tony Cenicola/The New York Times)

Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry
By Donald Hall
Houghton Mifflin, 195 pp., $24

Donald Hall at 80 is widely admired for his poetry, winner of the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award, among others, and a former US poet laureate. Hall also has been a longtime public figure in the world of poetry as a reader, lecturer, advocate, anthologist, editor, teacher, correspondent, and half of a popular and beloved literary couple with his second wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995.

But all along Hall has been a vital prose writer, too. He has published more books of prose (over 20) than of poetry (18), ranging from literary criticism and memoirs to short fiction, children's books, art criticism, essays, and sports writing, particularly baseball. His recollections of encounters with major figures in the world of poetry, "Remembering Poets" (1978), updated in 1992 and republished as "Their Ancient Glittering Eyes," is a delightful homage to his poetic influences and a display of storytelling panache. Hall's 1993 account of how his passion for poetry dovetails with his passion for farming, "Life Work," is a stirring ode to craft. His 2005 memoir "The Best Day The Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon," was a vivid act of public grieving, at once a celebration of love and intimate portrayal of pain.

Hall's writing across genres has always seemed well-knit. The poetry informs and stimulates the prose, lending it cohesion, compression, and clarity, while the prose fleshes out concerns within the poetry and sharpens his gift for narrative.

Now, with "Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry," Hall offers a piece of prose about being a poet. He looks back across the years to fill in gaps in his literary record, particularly his prep school years at Phillips Exeter Academy, some friendships not fully discussed in earlier books, life after the death of Kenyon, and the trials of growing old. It is both a literal unpacking and examination of memorabilia from "seventy or eighty boxes" stored at his mother's house, which "laid out my childhood and adolescence as if they assembled a model train," and a metaphoric unpacking of the memories those items generate. Rambling through Hall's New England childhood and education, teaching career at the University of Michigan, his decision to abandon it for a return to his ancestral farm in New Hampshire and productive literary life, the memoir coheres around the forces that shaped Hall as a writer and held that life together through eight decades.

Structurally, as Hall admits, "Unpacking the Boxes" has holes. Originally part of a much longer memoir, it was carved up to allow "The Best Day The Worst Day," to appear separately three years ago. That carving left "a hole in the middle" of this new book, which glosses over Kenyon and Hall's shared life. "Unpacking the Boxes" also "repeats patches of earlier writing," the poetry and the prose, "because I have spoken out of my experience for most of my writing life." There is also, he writes, "something large that I must leave out. I will speak little of my first marriage."

But these holes and repetitions do not ruin it as a satisfying stand-alone work. It is a warm-hearted exploration, from the perspective of old age, of how writing gave Hall's life its essential integrity. We see that even as a youngster he understood that following his dream took work: "I loved poems, reading them for hours, saying them aloud, trying to write them. When I finished drafting a poem, I went back to the start and revised it." This sense of writing "as art to make, to work at as a sculptor works at stone," has been a hallmark of his career, as he built books from well-made pieces, looking around for new modes and tones to master.

Because he has used the experience of daily life as material for his art, Hall is comfortable in writing candidly about his late-life losses as he dwells on "the planet of antiquity." The book's final chapter is a courageous revelation about the reality of aging, when the act of standing from a chair requires effort, when frailty and illness overtake the body, and falling is a constant threat. But, of course, he is no stranger to hard work.

"When you are three years old and your socks are falling down, somebody says 'Pull up your socks, Donnie,' " Hall tells us. "Then you are eighty and your socks fall down again. No one tells you to pull them up."

"Unpacking the Boxes" shows us that though Hall has been doing what he felt called to do for so long, he can still do it with grace and originality.

Floyd Skloot received a 2004 PEN USA award for his memoir of living with brain damage, "In the Shadow of Memory." His new memoir, "The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer's Life," has just been published.