Donald Hall served as poet laureate of the United States from 2006 to 2007 and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a recipient of the National Medal of Arts, awarded by the President. Now at 86 years of age, he sits in his home and looks out the window. "Generation after generation, my family's old people sat at this window to watch the year."
When one can no longer drive and it is very hard to walk, watching the happenings of the natural world from a comfortable chair is like having a front-row seat in the theater. "I watch the flowers erupt and subside. Snowdrops crack the wintry earth, crocuses, and dazzling daffodils. Tulips rise in extravagant crimsons and golds, metallic fleshy shapes that ask to be filled."
Hall began writing poems in seventh grade and only recently stopped doing so after 60 years. He recalls the joys of April which is Poetry month and his public readings. He writes fondly of his marriage to the poet Jane Kenyon who died at 47 after 15 months of leukemia. Then there are witty pieces about growing beards, smoking cigarettes, and working with an exercise coach late in the game of life. Hall muses on death but always comes back to his enchantment at his ancestral Eagle Pond farm in New Hampshire. It is a source of deep and abiding wonder for him.
