Review by New York Times Review
A CARNIVAL OF LOSSES By Donald Hall. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25.) Hall, who died on June 23, left behind a rich collection of poetry that earned him a National Medal of the Arts and a term as poet laureate of the United States. In his last memoir, he writes of life as he approached 90, with all its joys (like solitude or the ability to speak one's mind fully) and its losses (like the death of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon), the battle for paradise By Naomi Klein. (Haymarket, paper, $9.95.) Hurricane Maria left more than destruction in its wake. There is now a brewing political conflict over how to rebuild Puerto Rico, the subject of Klein's investigation in this slim book. On one side are what she calls the "disaster capitalists" looking for a profit, and on the other, local communities, the william h. gass reader By William H. Gass. (Knopf, $40.) A doorstop that celebrates the life of the experimental writer, this collection brings together over 50 examples of Gass's work - essays, criticism, short stories and novels. All heady and mysterious, trans like me By CN Lester. (Seal Press, paper, $16.99.) A British transgender rights activist and singer-songwriter, Lester uses these witty essays to help undermine some persistent myths. For example, Lester finds a long history of the use of "they" to describe a person who doesn't fit into one gender or another, with examples dating to Shakespeare and Jane Austen, lacks self-control By Roy Sekoff. (Big A, $25.) Sekoff was the founding editor of The Huffington Post and here writes of a life of mischief and high jinks, from a teenage visit to a Times Square porn store to his attempt to nab a tissue containing Oprah's tears. "I have begun reading the POWER BROKER in a grand pursuit to be the type of person who reads 'The Power Broker.' Robert Caro's obsessively detailed, 1,336-page tome about Robert Moses and the power he wielded over New York City's infrastructure can pad out any Brian Lehrer episode or Metro investigation: There is no better foundation to learning about how our city came to be. Caro renders Moses as larger than life, then cuts him down to human size. His intellect is vast, his hubris ghastly and his gall has made me gasp aloud twice so far. ft's all 1 talk about at every party, brunch or summer jam; and, let · me tell you, my upper arms are stronger already." - JAZMINE HUGHES, EDITOR, THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE LABS, ON WHAT SHE'S READING.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 2, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
That writing poetry exceeds his declining energies, Hall, one of the best American poets who grew up during the Great Depression and WWII, imparted in Essays after Eighty (2014). Throughout that book, however, he proved that prose most definitely doesn't. Not that it isn't difficult; Now it takes me a month to write seven hundred words, he says, in one of these further nonagenarian essays. Fortunately, those can be very short: his recollection of Allen Tate is just two lines long; of e. e. cummings, six; and both are in the section The Selected Poets of Donald Hall, to which poetry lovers may turn first and be delightfully surprised to discover they're more gossip than critique. There is much more about poetry, of course, most notably the longest entry, Necropoetics, about elegies and other poems of death, ending with his for his wife, the late Jane Kenyon. Another longer piece may be the best: Walking to Portsmouth tells the story behind Hall's Caldecott Medalist children's book, The Ox-Cart Man (1979). But they're all good.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Former U.S. poet laureate (2006-2007), Hall reflects on aging and death in this candid and often humorous memoir. Hall meanders over mundane losses in his life-the demise of mill towns, the root cellar in his New Hampshire home-as well as the death of his wife, poet Jane Kenyon, 20 years ago, and the poets he has known. In a meditative opening, Hall says about aging, "you are old when the waiter doesn't mention that you are holding the menu upside down," and notes that "in your eighties you take two naps a day. Nearing ninety you don't count the number of naps." He reminisces about various poets he's known: James Dickey was "the best liar I ever knew"; Allen Tate "always looked grumpy"; James Wright was always passionate about literature. Hall no longer writes poetry or essays, but prefers to write about his life and experiences and "tell short anecdotes.... why should the nonagenarian hold anything back?" In the longest section, "Necropoetics," Hall bares his grief during his wife's prolonged death from cancer, recognizing how much her voice still lives in his own, "spiraling together images and diphthongs of the dead who were once the living, our necropoetics of grief and love in the unforgivable absence of flesh." Hall's ruminative and detailed reflections on life make this a fantastic follow-up to his Essays After Eighty. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
A kind of sequel to Essays After Eighty, this collection of brief writings from former U.S. poet laureate Hall (1928-2018) is filled with loss and pain yet always finds something to celebrate. Gathered quite literally as a set of notes, the pieces range in length from barely two sentences ("Allan Tate") to three to five pages, with the exception of "Necropoetics," a 20-page meditation on the poetry of death illuminated by Hall's experience of the actualities. Particularly enjoyable is "Collected Poets," in which he offers brief sketches of poets he's known; his most moving remembrances is of Jane Kenyon, one of the 20th century's purest poets. Hall turns to this subject time and again in these vignettes and in every instance, with a beguiling tug of tenderness, recalls some detail of his lost love. Readers will find neither anguish nor sorrow haunting his memories, instead adoration and consolation. VERDICT The literary insights will be useful to scholars, but the beautiful recollections and the joyful and vital vision Hall offers are gifts to us all. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 1/22/18.]-Herman Sutter, St. Agnes Acad., Houston © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A joyful, wistful celebration of poetry, poets, and a poet's life.Personal matters that former poet laureate Hall wrote about in Essays After Eighty (2014, etc.) pop up again, this time with a greater sense of urgency: "As I write toward my nineties I shed my skin. I tell short anecdotes, I hazard an opinion, speculate, assume, and remember. Why should the nonagenarian hold anything back?" In the book's fourth section, "A Carnival of Losses," the author returns to stories about his New Hampshire life, relatives, friends, his appearances on Garrison Keillor's radio show (where onceoff airthey traded dirty limericks, watching baseball, and interviewing Boris Karloff in high school. Also included here is his somber and poignant New Yorker piece, "Necropoetics," largely about his wife, poet and translator Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995. "Poetry begins with elegy," he writes, as he ruminates on the subject. Poetasters will enjoy his "The Selected Poets of Donald Hall" section, pithy, sharp, and gossipy profiles and anecdotes about poets he has known and met, some slighte.g., "my recollections of some poets are brief. Allen Tate always looked grumpy." These are countered by those Hall loved, like Robert Creeley, Theodore Roethke, Seamus Heaney, and James Wright. Then there's James Dickey, the "best liar I ever knew," and Tom Clark, the "best student I ever had." Hall's admiring piece on Richard Wilbur includes a short, insightful passage on prosody in Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress." The book's first section, "Notes Nearing Ninety," shows off Hall's humor and wit, as in "The Vaper," about how vaping helped him quit smoking (mostly), "The Last Poem," about the only time he expressed his politics in a newspaper ("it went bacterial"), and a piece about frequently losing his teethliterally.There's much to enjoy in these exuberant "notes." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
