Essays After Eighty

Donald Hall's observations on the life he is living in his 80s are edifying, because he is so mindful as he reflects upon the details of his life. His memories of past events are intriguing, because the writers of our time spring into new focus through his commentary.

I stopped reading this soon in after one too many pages about less-than-interesting events in his past. I thought this was going to be a book about the present -- more musing and philosophical, something that anyone could immediately relate to, not long-winded re-countings of past dinners and conferences where the author seems to like dropping a lot of names. It just wasn't what I had hoped it would be, a frank and enlightening reflection on getting old. Based on others' reviews, it must have gotten much better further in, but I lost patience.

This is a wonderful (but slim) collection of essays; Donald Hall's musings on his past and present. He is (obviously) in his eighties, and his voice is clear. In our youth obsessed culture, we need to hear more from the old and for that alone I am glad for this book.

I don't appreciate reading synopses of books, so I won't write one, and anyway, this volume is thin enough that telling you much about it would spoil the fun of reading. I came to it fresh, not having read him before (indeed), and found it a wonderful read. Mr. Hall's style is spare, pointedly witty, and often wise.

I read this book on an afternoon where we had no power in our home in Maine; I read bits aloud to my husband. We're in our late fifties and live in a town where we are on the younger side of middle and old age. So, reading this spoke to much of our condition.

So, we (not just I) enjoyed Mr. Hall's sharing of his life and memories, and sharing his gratitude for that life, both past and present. Even more, I enjoyed that he did so without veering into either sweet sentimentality or the (terribly overdone) stance of an old curmudgeon. He has led a good and robust life and still does, though now from a wheelchair. There's no self pity in that; the life of his mind is rich indeed, and he had led a fairly charmed and privileged life before (and I suppose he still does).

We need to understand the richness of simply looking out a window. Mr. Hall tells us about this without preaching it. He may be an old man, but his voice sounds totally fresh. He is simply telling us what life has been and is for him. He is a writer, so he writes it. And anyway, this isn't a self help book.

I've written enough; I'm not a writer, but Mr. Hall certainly is.

In all, I felt I'd spent an afternoon with someone I'm glad I met. Hall's beautiful writing was a pleasure to read and I can not recommend a book more highly. Now I'll go back and read what came before.

Well, I live single digit miles away from Donald Hall. I used to see him in the crappy stores he describes, and I drive by his church whenever I drive to Concord. He's right about New Hampshire, as it was, alas.

I've read a half dozen Donald Hall books, including a collected poems volume, something about Apples and Stone (I liked his newer poems best). But mostly I read his essay collections, the first being STRING TOO SHORT TO BE SAVED, which I found on a remainder table maybe thirty years ago. I loved it. Then there were his memoirs about his life with Jane Kenyon and the years after her death. Both were wrenching to read.

So I know a little about Donald Hall, and I like the way he writes, especially his self-effacing sense of humor, which is on display often here, in ESSAYS AFTER EIGHTY, which could well be his last book, as Hall is nearly ninety now. He knows this, and is actually okay with it. He's won numerous prestigious awards, and was even, reluctantly, America's Poet Laureate for a year. He is philosophical about the honor, noting, "Look at the sad parade of Poet Laureates."

And, regarding his "fame," he chuckles at being once taken for the Donald Hall who cofounded Hallmark Greeting Cards. Another time a man asked him, "Are you Donald Hall?" (Yes) "So am I." It IS a common name, after all.

Hall talks much about the "diminishments" of growing old, poor balance, falling down a lot. Having to surrender his driver's license at 80 was a blow, limiting him in his activities. And all the other indignities that aging brings.

This is a book that old people will understand and relate to. They may not LIKE it, but they'll GET it. I like Donald Hall and I'm an old person. And I loved these pieces. Hall says poetry has "abandoned" him, but he'll keep on writing. Write on, Donald. Very highly recommended (especially for old folks).

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

I’ve followed Donald Hall’s career since the 1970s. I almost feel as if I’ve grown old with him leading the way. “Essays After Eighty” is a memoir written as a wonderful collection of short essays describing events, observations, and thoughts that have impacted this great octogenarian.

Observing that “old people are a separate form of life,” Hall reflects on the aging process which he describes as narrowing circles. Now, in his 80s, he is no longer writing poetry (he was poet laureate of the United States in 2006-2007), no longer driving, has a myriad of infirmities, and he experiences old age as “a ceremony of losses.”

There are essays on death, on writing, on rejection, and on relationships. He writes about his childhood, his falls, his medical problems, and mourning the death of his last wife, poet Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995. One point I must disagree with – in these essays, Hall has not stopped writing poetry. These essays are poetry. They are honest, lyrical, and revealing.

In “Essays After Eight,” former U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall writes that “poetry abandoned me,” so he turned instead to verse, and we’re the lucky recipients.

Each of these 14 essays is an exquisite gem, with very carefully crafted language that will make you laugh out loud, dab away a tear, recognize universal truths about life and aging and loss, and want to immediately start re-reading them.

In Hall’s words, “Revision takes time, a pleasing long process. Some of these essays took more than eight drafts, some as few as thirty.” And that diligent care is brilliantly evident in his raw honesty, considerable grace, self-effacement, and in his still wonderfully keen wit.

“Thirty was terrifying, forty I never noticed because I was drunk, fifty was best with a total change of life, sixty came to extend the bliss of fifty – and then came my cancers, Jane’s death and over the years I traveled to another universe.”

“It’s almost relaxing to know I’ll die fairly soon … My goal in life is making it to the bathroom.”

Those who love poetry and Hall’s earlier work will very much enjoy his anecdotes about his career, the poetry “business” and his unsparing opinions of his peers.

“When I was young, I could project, and now without a microphone I can’t be heard in the tenth row… There’s a poem in which I moo like a cow. Cow’s lungs are bigger than ours. I approach the microphone intimately, and softly but audibly moo as long as a cow moos. My friends say it’s the best line I’ve ever written.”

Other readers may find his memories about growing up in rural New England, working on his family farm, splitting time between woodsy New Hampshire and more developed Connecticut, fascinating.

I found his ruminations on life “in another universe” – that of an aged, somewhat infirm, unrepentant (he can’t resist a cigarette here or there) person on the back side of his 80’s – some of the best writing I’ve read in quite a while. Hall is still a dazzling wordsmith and this is a small (134 pages in my edition) treasure of a book.

I really enjoyed several of the essays in this small volume. In one he even talks about how he writes and rewrites the essays, and about how he has to write essays now because poetry has abandoned him. It seems like he writes his topic from a few different angles, and/or from a few different time periods in his life.

The first essay I wasn't fond of was called No Smoking. It felt to me as if he had googled the social history of smoking and shoehorned it into his personal anecdotes. Now, maybe he didn't do that at all and was working entirely from memory, but it felt that way to me. And it doesn't matter whether he did or not - the point it, the writing felt more forced and less personal, the personal touch being what is strongest about his writing.

And then later in the book I found that in a strange way, the essays all felt similar to me, as if there was a formula or structure they were following. I think if his essays appeared in a monthly magazine I would look forward to them immensely, but reading them all at once didn't work quite as well.

Still, I recommend the book for readers of all ages, as there is some wisdom to be found for everyone

I borrowed this from the library, not knowing what to expect, but it was short, and I found it light and easy reading while I was eating breakfast. I'm not familiar with his poetry, so I can't make a comparison. Like I said, it was easy reading, most of the time, but after a while it grated on me. Too many names of old friends or old flames, and I wasn't mesmerized by any of the recollections. He seemed to take delight in telling us overmuch how physically incompetent he was and is.

He does seem to come from a family with pronounced longevity genes that might see him through for a few more years, because he sure hasn't taken good care of his body. Smoking, diabetic, hating exercise, not particular about the food he eats. Such a person would normally be dead before his age, so if he enjoys being alive, he should be thankful for his genetic heritage.

I wasn't particularly impressed with his style of writing, but perhaps I had higher expectations of a published poet who was once our poet laureate.I didn't hate this book, and there were parts I enjoyed, but toward the end I was forcing myself to finish this small book. I guess it's a matter of taste, so I'll leave it at that. I did relate to his pain over the loss of Jane, his wife. Apparently his love for her was strong and lasting. Because it's so short and readable, you could do worse than spending some time with it.

Mostly confined to a wheelchair, living alone with no tech skills (Hall is averse to computers) and watching MSNBC when he’s not writing, reading, and napping, Donald Hall writes fourteen short essays from the standpoint of a man in his mid-eighties with no self-pity. There is, however, a recurring sadness whenever his essays refer to his wife who died of leukemia at the young age of forty-seven.

For the most part, though, Hall writes with stoical courage about the challenges of old age. A lot of his reminisces, including the times he’s grown a beard, cooking with garlic, the habit of smoking (and trying to quit) serve as bookmarks to his remarkable literary career.

Some essays begged for more development. When he taught English in college coming to class in hippie garb and living the radical age with his students suggested some madcaps that I wish could have been revealed with more detail.

One of his more important perspectives is the state of book and magazine publishing. A famous poet, Hall mordantly writes that one of his children’s books (perhaps written on a whim?) will probably remain in print above all his other books. Also, he left academia to be a professional magazine writer, a job, he explains, is no longer possible since very few magazine pay enough to sustain such a profession.

All in all, this is a looking-glass into Hall’s life from the vantage point of old age and the reader gets a deep look in this tiny book of an exceptional literary career. Highly recommended.

Donald Hall talks about the precision he uses in his writing, sometimes re-writing pieces up to 80 times, and it really shows. This is a thin collection of his essays, and they are wonderfully written, both from a stylistic perspective as well as a reading enjoyment one. His choice of wording is deliberate and careful, and it's a great little collection, spanning Hall's life from youth to young adult to middle age to award winning to old age. The biggest disappointment is that the essay are so short and the book thin, because the reader will want more.

This book is delicious and funny and poignant, as charming as I'd expected it to be. Though unfamiliar with Hall's poetry, I was drawn to the book based - now don't laugh - on the cover. Also, I have a soft spot for elderly gentlemen of a literary bent. I knew his name, and his reputation, but I've read little of his work. Now that I've read this delightful book, I may just have to rectify that. If you love Donald Hall you'll surely love this book. If you know little about him, but share my penchant for aging icons, you'll feel the same. A delight, through and through.

Donald Hall talks about the precision he uses in his writing, sometimes re-writing pieces up to 80 times, and it really shows. This is a thin collection of his essays, and they are wonderfully written, both from a stylistic perspective as well as a reading enjoyment one. His choice of wording is deliberate and careful, and it's a great little collection, spanning Hall's life from youth to young adult to middle age to award winning to old age. The biggest disappointment is that the essay are so short and the book thin, because the reader will want more.

This book is delicious and funny and poignant, as charming as I'd expected it to be. Though unfamiliar with Hall's poetry, I was drawn to the book based - now don't laugh - on the cover. Also, I have a soft spot for elderly gentlemen of a literary bent. I knew his name, and his reputation, but I've read little of his work. Now that I've read this delightful book, I may just have to rectify that. If you love Donald Hall you'll surely love this book. If you know little about him, but share my penchant for aging icons, you'll feel the same. A delight, through and through.

I don't really get poetry, but his prose description of poetry is some of the brightest, most figurative, writing I've read. It almost helps me to get poetry, and I'll keep that by me the next time I try some.

Life is more closely circumscribed when old, but his descriptions make it clear that there's as much richness in the small and close, if we just take time to appreciate it.

The first chapter is the best and most prose-poetic in the book, and best especially for a single line - "I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is on the whole preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two." - that reminds those of us not yet there that old age is a burden but also a gift.

I have read dozens of memoirs -- it is my favorite genre and Essays After Eighty will now lead the list. This book is touching, hysterically funny, profound, tender, scary, and simply brutally authentic, authentic as one can be in the process of recall. A must read!
Jan Marquart, author of the CanYouFindMyLove.com children's series, and 10 books for adults on writing and healing.

Kept imagining how wonderful it must be to have a mind so clear and active at Hall's age. Reading this wonderful book was a lot like being a long time friend of the family that often tags along with a close family member when they go to the authors home for a visit. His writing is very conversational to read. I felt privy to stories and wonderful memories that would be shared with only the family and the closest of friends. From the vantage point of his 80 plus years the author shares what ends up being important in life. It turns out to be the ties with the people he loved most which in turn were those who loved him most. Family ties to places and the past, big on the list of what matters day in and day out. The 'surprises' aging leaves laying around for us to discover, good, bad and indifferent. I thank this author for writing his essays there is much to be learned from those who have lived long lives, I love it when someone shares their experiences. Donald Hall is a writer equipped to tell such a story well, well traveled, well educated, well connected with people from all walks of life all this and his own gifted ability make him a wonderful candidate to share from deep insight what it looks like after eighty.

In this slim volume, renowned poet Donald Hall reminisces in prose, with the expected observations on nature, friends and family, and poetry, along with commentary on death, smoking, rejection, sleeping on steel vs. concrete, health, post-war Europe, beards, and over a thousand other topics, large and small.

It is a very intimate and interesting commentary, and after a while, seems like a conversation in its meandering voice.

One of my favorite categories of books is that of essays and other non-fiction by novelists. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King, The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life by Amy Tan, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood, and there are so many more. I've read little of the fiction of these writers, but it seems that knowing how to tell a good story is just as important in writing articles and essays as it is in writing science fiction and horror.

Donald Hall is not a novelist, he's a poet, quite a famous one. He gave up his tenured position at university when he was in his forties to write full time. While it was not quite possible to earn a living writing poetry, he also wrote essays and articles, many about baseball, and was able to make it as a freelancer.

In Essays After Eighty, Hall writes about whatever strikes him. He reminisces about his childhood, about his youth and middle age, and about being old. He chronicles his changing attitude to literary awards and honorary degrees. I especially enjoyed reading about the trip he and his wife took as young newlyweds in 1952 while doing postgraduate work at Oxford. They put their tiny Morris Minor on a ferry to France and then drove to Yugoslavia and to Greece. Adventure ensued.

Some of the pieces here run to the mundane as Hall considers his various beards and his experiences as a cigar and cigarette smoker.

I'm happy to have finally discovered Donald Hall.

In this little book, Donald Hall writes eloquently about a variety of subjects including his youth, (he wrote his first poem at the age of thirteen), his relationships, his love of nature, smoking, various beards he has sported through the years, the challenges, slights, and indignities of aging, or as he calls it, antiquity, his attempts to stay fit though using a wheelchair, and so much more. I particularly enjoyed his writing about writing, (he says that he finds revision pleasing - and that some of the essays took as many as eighty drafts!) and what it takes to have a career as a poet. He refers to his forty years of living as a freelance writer as a great joy, and that is reflected in these essays. His style is chatty and congenial: sometimes spiced with wry humor, sometimes boisterous, and sometimes tender, especially when writing about his various partners in life.

I didn't know much about Donald Hall or his enormous body of work before I read this book. This book invites the reader to go deeper into Hall's poetry as well as his prose.
Highly recommended.

This is a collection of superb essays on the general theme of old age. Donald Hall, 85, is an honest reporter of the pleasures and pains of being very old. His observations are moving, revealing, poignant, and sometimes very funny.

One of the pleasures of reading this book is the wonderful writing. Hall notes that he loves revising and that the essays in this volume were revised 30 - 60 times (or more). This care with language, so appropriate for a poet, makes every sentence, paragraph, and essay a treat to read.

I had the pleasure of reading two of these essays when they were published in The New Yorker, I am pleased to report that all 14 essays are of this high quality. This is one of the best collections of essays I have ever read - highly recommended!

These essays seem more an aide-memoire than a memoir. They can be read in any order and and weave temporal threads together to build a patchwork perspective on what can be described as a life of middling white privilege. The partially polished patina of the prose sheds an interesting dappled light on the authors reflections and he engages with an honesty that, perhaps, only great age brings. Very enjoyable.

Hall's essays are entertaining and dip into some serious topics (illness, alcoholic excess) without detracting from the author's tone of musings. Certainly Hall maintains a strong command of the language and what language can do for expression. His digressions are as creative as his word choices. Yet the observations about nature, writing, and people are ultimately conventional.

This is a well written book. My favorite sentence was "When I lament and darken over my diminishments, I accomplish nothing". It has a slightly nostalgic flair with a few dashes of curmudgeonliness. It is a series of essays and is a quick read.

Essays read elsewhere delivered (“nothing but elegy”) a sense for what Hall’s life became after Jane Kenyon. I knew what I was in for. Or so I thought. Fifty four pages into the book, there’s no poetry but a snip from one of hers. There are references to a Donald Hall poetry line now and then, and sometimes a title is given out. But this essay collection – a near-autobiography -- is about a life seen almost exclusively from its current vantage point.

After a puzzling bit of naturalist monologue which serves to frame the start and end of this project, Hall wastes no time before announcing that he is no longer writing poetry. He offers tips on writing, revising, on personal pronouns. He casually considers editors past. They seem to have what is now only a distant relevance.

"In my best poems and prose I've become steadily more naked, with a nakedness that disguises itself by wearing clothes."
Naked or not, his antiquity screams from the cover photo. But when I read that a National Gallery of Art security guard said to him, "Did we enjoy our din-din?" the humiliation was thorough, humorless. Hall was there in 2011 to receive the National Medal of Arts. ("Wracked with antiquity" or not, at least he fared better when recognized by Philip Roth outside White House security.)

Hall gives us glimpses of other poets of his era -- Adrienne Rich and John Ashbery were "classmates at Harvard." But he dismissively mentions his year as Poet Laureate, "which allowed me more of Washington's museums." Poetry is as much profession as art. As he had written elsewhere, he was a freelancer, not a college professor in an MFA program. His essays never veer far from the concrete. There is a chapter on smoking. Truly. An extended riff on beardedness, and its lack. His New England residence is described in detail, the barn . . . and so on. It’s skippable description, save mention of pre-eBook four hundred feet of bookshelves.

A mostly plainspoken Hall is content to reduce poetry to “content,” and to write dispassionately about rejection slips. For him poetry sparks, but it is an obvious combustion. “Really, content is only an excuse for oral sex. The most erotic poem in English is Paradise Lost.” Hall weighs in on the reading styles of Stevens, Elliot, Moore, WC Williams, Dylan Thomas. He talks about being at the Dodge Poetry Festival, which this reviewer attends religiously. He notes with slight interest at the waning reputations of Lowell, Roethke, MacLeish. At times he does so with distressing dispassion.

This is likely intentional.

"Nothing in human life is unmixed." The self-described antiquity, we learn a few chapters later, was a sturdy 6 foot two when he married a shy 6 foot one Kirby. He could have started with that, of course, but something of the poet remains as he arranges scenes for the reader. Finalities carry their necessary – in Hall’s case, unvarnished -- burden: “I survive into my eighties, writing, and oddly cheerful, although disabled and largely alone.”

The book catalogs the frailties, inconveniences, and not only his own. “Friends die, friends become demented, friends quarrel, friends drift with old age into silence.”

What about avid listeners at poetry readings? “They heard lines that resembled poetry.” Rather they had mistaken the tracings and retracings of this first poetry editor at the Paris Review who had sketched out so many versions of his New Hampshire Ragged Mountain that it became poetic.

I have enjoyed Donald Hall's poetry over the years, and I expected a significant piece about aging and writing in these essays. Some sections are satirically humorous (I enjoyed the essay on death) and there are brief insightful comments on aging. But I was generally disappointed. It appears that he has made a final career out of his partly self-induced aging with its gritty physical characteristics. This comes after his good poetry career and a season of writing based on Jane Kenyon's (my favorite poet) death. I have little knowledge of his other writing. At eighty-four and myself a published poet, I am not really interested in his eating habits, travels, assorted women, honors, famous acquaintances and ordinary family reminiscences which in my estimation have little literary value. Even if he is a famous writer, he should have saved most of these essays in a memoir for family. I don't think I could be friends with the man described in this book.

If you are writing a dissertation on Donald Hall this book will be invaluable. If you are a lover of his poetry you will also find this interesting. I am neither studying him nor a fan, so I read this book more for his reputation, and curious about his take on old age. I didn't find the writing particularly engaging or memorable; nor, did I find his thoughts on aging elucidating.

Trivial, poorly-written meanderings of a doctrinaire liberal academic without anything to say.
Really, this is just awful. There is not a single wise or original thought in this entire book. This man has abused his body in various ways for four decades and is now surprised that he is in bad shape and moans about it incessantly. Spews out the standard line (Vietnam bad, Obama good, Rush Limbaugh bad) without any analysis or explanation, just counts on his NPR-loving audience to wink and nod in approval. I hope his poetry is better.
Want some wisdom about life in the fifties and sixties and some really good insights into growing old from a revered literary figure who knew George Plimpton, etc.? Try James Salter's Burning the Days instead of this.