The Back Chamber

by Donald Hall

The first full-length volume of poems in a decade by former poet laureate of the United States Donald Hall

In The Back Chamber, Donald Hall illuminates the evocative, iconic objects of deep memory—"a cowbell," "a white stone perfectly round," "a three-legged milking stool"—that serve to foreground the rich meditations on time and mortality that run through his remarkable new collection. While Hall’s devoted readers will recognize many of his long-standing preoccupations—baseball, the family farm, love, sex, and friendship—what will strike them as new is the fierce, pitiless poignancy he reveals as his own life’s end comes into view. The Back Chamber is far from being death-haunted but rather is lively, irreverent, sexy, hilarious, ironic, and sly—full of the life-affirming energy that has made Donald Hall one of America’s most popular and enduring poets.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Donald Hall was considered one of the major American poets of his generation.

His poetry explores the longing for a more bucolic past and reflects the poet’s abiding reverence for nature. Although Hall gained early success with his first collection, Exiles and Marriages (1955), his later poetry is generally regarded as the best of his career. Often compared favorably with such writers as James Dickey, Robert Bly, and James Wright, Hall used simple, direct language to evoke surrealistic imagery. In addition to his poetry, Hall built a respected body of prose that includes essays, short fiction, plays, and children’s books. Hall, who lived on the New Hampshire farm he visited in summers as a boy, was also noted for the anthologies he has edited and is a popular teacher, speaker, and reader of his own poems.

Born in 1928, Hall grew up in Hamden, Connecticut. The Hall household was marked by a volatile father and a mother who was “steadier, maybe with more access to depths because there was less continual surface,” as Hall explained in an essay for Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series (CAAS). “To her I owe my fires, to my father my tears. I owe them both for their reading.” By age twelve, Hall had discovered the poet and short story writer Edgar Allan Poe: “I read Poe and my life changed,” he remarked in CAAS. Another strong influence in Hall’s early years was his maternal great-grandfather’s farm in New Hampshire, where he spent many summers. Decades later, he bought the same farm and settled there as a full-time writer and poet.

Hall attended Philips Exeter Academy and had his first poem published at age 16. He was a participant at the prestigious Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, where he met Robert Frost, that same year. From Exeter, Hall went to Harvard University, attending class alongside Adrienne Rich, Robert Bly, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery; he also studied for a year with Archibald MacLeish. Hall earned a BLitt from Oxford University and won the Newdigate contest for his poem “Exile,” one of the few Americans ever to win the prize. Returning to the United States, Hall spent a year at Stanford, studying under the poet-critic Yvor Winters, before returning to Harvard to join the prestigious Society of Fellows. It was there that Hall assembled Exiles and Marriages, a tightly-structured collection crafted in rigid rhyme and meter. In 1953, Hall also became the poetry editor of the Paris Review, a position he held until 1961. In 1957 he took a position as assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan, where he remained until 1975. While at Michigan, Hall met the young Jane Kenyon. They later married and, when Hall’s grandmother, who owned Eagle Pond Farm, passed away, bought the farm, left teaching, and moved there together. The collections Kicking the Leaves (1978) and The Happy Man (1986) reflect Hall’s happiness at his return to the family farm, a place rich with memories and links to his past. Many of the poems explore and celebrate the continuity between generations. The Happy Man won the Lenore Marshall/Nation Prize. Hall’s next book, The One Day (1988), won the National Book Critics Circle Award. A long poem that meditates on the on-set of old age, The One Day, like much of Hall’s early work, takes shape under formal pressure: composed of 110 stanzas, split over three sections, its final sections are written in blank verse. The critic Frederick Pollack praised the book as possibly “the last masterpiece of American Modernism. Any poet who seeks to surpass this genre should study it; any reader who has lost interest in contemporary poetry should read it.” Old and New Poems (1990) contains several traditional poems from earlier collections, as well as more innovative verses not previously published. “Baseball,” included in The Museum of Clear Ideas (1993), is the poet’s ode to the great American pastime and is structured around t

Reviews

[Jimmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Could be subtitled: Donald Hall at 80. I was particularly moved by a poem called "Poetry and Ambition." In it, Hall describes what it is like to be ignored by colleges, poetry festivals, and so on after he grew old. I saw him with Sharon Olds the other night. The crowd gathered in long lines for Ms. Olds but almost ignored Mr. Hall. But it gave me a chance to chat with him.

[marymurtz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably not a good idea to sit down and read an entire book of poetry in one sitting. I like Hall's poetry but this volume seemed more loose and sprawling than I like, and of course, at this stage in his life, it seems filled with regret at the turns of life and filled with his own mortality.

That said, there were parts that took my breath away, especially a poem called "Advent":
"When I see a cradle rocking
What is it that I see?
I see a rood on the hilltop
Of Calvary..."

And his sly and irreverent take on things is still evident, particularly in the poem "Creative Writing":
"Translating Virgil, eighty lines a day, Keats never did pick up his MFA."

Hall writes about an octogenarian poet trying to find metaphors in a thesaurus, trying to make poetry even though his work has been taken out of new anthologies. I love that the last line of that poem is "If no one will ever read him again, what the f**k?"

I know I would have loved this book more if I'd read it on paper instead of an advance reader copy on Kindle; poetry should be seen in format and touched while reading, the way opera can't be fully enjoyed just by sound, but also by sight. (Am I crazy to think this way?)

[Nadine in NY Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

I know Donald Hall is held up as one of our great modern poets, but this book didn't work for me.  These poems are too earthy for my taste, sometimes even prurient.  Hall is clearly concerned with rhyme and rhythm and form, but his poems are not the sort of thing I want to memorize and repeat.  He wrote this book at the end of his career, and maybe in his old age he was a bit too obsessed with his dick.

After the Prom
They parked where others parked and steamed
The windows while they took
Their clothes off just as they had dreamed
Or read of in a book.

That paradise of pubic hair!
Those nipples hard and pink!
Swelling with lust, enthralled to stare,
They briefly paused to think

Of parents, preachers, pregnancy
And punishment. In shame,
They looked upon their nudity.
They looked, they frotted, they came.

They are not all so light-hearted.  The last poem in the collection walloped me right in the heart.
(And I mean this, consider this a TW for sadness.)

Envy
Ambitious in middle life, I envied her simple unambiguous joy.
When she was young, she chased her slobbery tennis ball
and carried it back to me, teasing, or leapt two feet in the air
in ecstasy at my morning return from buying the newspaper,
or, instinct with rapture, hurtled through first snow
to explode a smoke of powder from her paws, or walking
vanished into the summer woods, then panted waiting
by a birch on New Canada Road she knew I would come to. 

A dozen years later her hindquarters dragged and twisted,
or her legs splayed on linoleum as she bent to eat
from her bowl of kibble, or she struggled to curve her back
in order to defecate, and shit accumulated in her fur, until
one night she crawled on the floor in spasms like a seal
flippering on sand.  The next morning, with dread and resolve,
I drove her to the veterinarian, whose needle killed her.
In painful old age, I envy the instant mercy of pentobarbitol.

[Michael Morris · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best pieces in this collection, I think, are the sequences. He seems to flourish in the self-imposed form of nine stanzas of nine lines with nine syllables (should this be called a "baseball" suite?). The central section of the volume, "Ric's Progress," is my favorite: a long poem about a life that I believe would escape notice except at family gatherings, but which stands as a metaphor for much of what is tragic about America.
A couple of the poems seem a bit marred by flat lines, and a few may strike the reader as self-pitying. However, taken as a whole this is a collection about impermanence and memory that needs even those flawed pieces.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bangers and Mash, Ric’s Progress, and Closing were my favorite. Enjoy the New England imagery and take on middle and late life.

[Jgrace · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Back Chamber – Donald Hall

3 stars

I responded to this slim volume of poems as I have to most of Donald Hall’s writing. It’s worth reading all of it to find the gems. This collection ranges in topics from baseball to infidelity. There are poignant poems of grief and remembrance beside self-mocking poems of a poet’s life. I enjoy Hall most when his writing is humorous or nostalgic. I’m less impressed when he is writing coarsely about sex. This is probably just a woman’s response to a male viewpoint, but throwing the F bomb into a poem seems like such a cheap shot.
I did read every poem, more than once. I found the gems and those I will read again:
Love’s Progress, the Pursuit of Poetry, The Widower’s Cowbell and The Back Chamber. All of them gems, worth reading.

[Eryk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just picked this one up at Barnes & Noble. (God, did I hate shelling out $22.00!) It was supposed to come out on 9/13, but when I called to put an order in, they said: "No need to order it, Sir. We have two on the shelf." My response: "Well, take one of those suckers off because I'll be right there." I will be meeting Mr. Hall in two weeks for a reading. We were uncertain he'd be able to make it all the way up from New Hampshire, but we were blessed to hear he is in good health. I. Can't. Wait!

(Interestingly enough, Mr. Hall is a fan of Kurt Schwitters (which I never knew), author of one of my other "current" reads I'm banging through. And he gives a shout out to Kurt in his poem, Meatloaf. Can you dig that shit? Because I can!)

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 4 out of 5]

I will return to this many times, one reading is not enough,

[Grady · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection is from 2011, but some of the poems were written as far back as 2007. Hall’s poetry is strong: the meter and meaning are clear, accessible, and emotionally moving. But the focus of these poems is, overall, narrow: poems expressing frustration with his slowing body and mind; poems expressing (beautifully) how much he misses his wife, Jane Kenyon (d. 1995); poems of loneliness, or valediction for departed friends or lovers. There’s a lot about history, too - the generations his family before him lived at the farm, the weight of over a century of their collected stuff. What’s not present: a sense of ongoing wonder or possibility about what the future could hold, celebration of new experiences or ideas. He talks about sitting and watching a family barn in the afternoon or evening’s golden light - that could be gratitude and joy, though he doesn’t say so - it comes across mostly as elegiac. These are good poems, well worth reading and feeling. I hope, when/if I reach the age Hall was when he wrote them, that my usual mood is more forward-looking and happier than this.

Some of my favorite poems from this slim collection are: ‘Conclusion at Union Lake’, an indirect and understated memory of a breakup; ‘Nymph and Shepherd’, silly and erotic (and a kind of humblebrag, whether or not he meant it that way); ‘Closing’, in memory of his friend Liam; ‘What We Did’, a description of a typical day in his life with Jane Kenyon; ‘Freezes and Junes’, another poem about missing Jane, but perhaps the most hopeful in the collection; ‘Goosefeathers’, a memory of visiting his grandparents at the farm when he was 12; and ‘Poetry and Ambition’, a wry lament for outliving one’s professional identity.

[Andres Eguiguren · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was, I believe, Hall's last book of poetry. Published in 2011, he then went on to write Essays After Eighty (which I read write before reading this) and finally A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety, which I will read next. Having not read his poetry before, I noticed a lot of similarities with his essays. Like the essays, the poems are very personal and autobiographical: a man nearing the end of his life and looking back at family memories, life in rural New Hampshire, and the small pleasures of spending the day on a chair staring at a barn or listening to a baseball game on the radio.

[Khepre · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book felt unwoven. Besides several baseball metaphors that categorically didn’t make sense, this book felt like a random hodge bodge of poems put together. I also didn’t like the way that the lines were interwoven in this collection. The lines felt like a track race or running into a friend but you have ten minutes before work, a collection of summarized poems or summarized stories with no poetic structure.

[Margie Hunter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published when he was 83

This anthology can't help but look back over decades of life, love, lust, and family, published when the poet was in his eighties. This is the first collection of his that I have read, so I don't know if earlier ones are so autobiographical. His New England family farmhouse is a wonderful metaphor for a full life. The poems are bittersweet, as we look to a time without the poet or ourselves in it.

[Joe · Rating 2 out of 5]

Actually, 2.5 stars. I do like Hall’s overall style, but for some reason (content?), this collection doesn’t do whole lot for me. Maybe it was his prolific use of the f-word (laziness?) or lack of hope? I’m not sure.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think i am at the right age for this specific book from this specific poet. Usually such spare language would turn me away but i am willing to read more by Hall and i will see if i like his wife's poetry too.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hall's objects of desire, love and interest come to vivid life here: a wife who has passed, the accumulated stuff of everyday lives, baseball, poetry itself. Often moving, occasionally brilliant.

[Jessie Wheeler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read his prose, but hadn't tried his poetry yet. Wow! So talented!!

[Nicky Enriquez · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful collection of poetry depicting the beauty and pain of life and loss.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

The melancholy musings of a poet who has outlived many of his friends and family. Having read his late wife Jane Kenyon's poetry, I mourn with him.

[Barbara Matteau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply a fabulous book of poems. I wanted to start it all over again. He’s a master of his craft.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Back Chamber was published in 2011 and is likely the last collection of new poems we will be honored to receive from Donald Hall. In a review of a recent book of his essays it said one of the losses of old age experienced in this ninth decade of life for the poet, essayist, memoirist, children’s author, scholar, was the capacity to write poetry. The demands of poetry are beyond what Hall feels he can now answer. I have read much of Hall’s prose but only recent volumes of his poetry so I have much of his back catalog to look forward to and the inevitable and highly anticipated career-spanning collections—Selected, Collected, Complete. In the meantime I am grateful for this last new collection.

The Back Chamber is the name of one of the poems and the phrase appears in another. It is the place where a “house’s genius” lies, where its memories and artifacts are stored, clues to other lives, times and meanings. Meanings dependent on the lives and times that lived and have gone. Hall lived much of his life in the house of his grandfather, which holds decades of continual memories for him—relics, things:

“When I walk in my house I see pictures, / bought long ago, framed and hanging / —de Kooning, Arp, Laurencin, Henry Moore— / that I’ve cherished and stared at for years, / yet my eyes keep returning to the masters / of the trivial—a white stone perfectly rounded, / tiny lead models of baseball players, a cowbell, / a broken great-grandmother’s rocker, / a dead dog’s toy—valueless, unforgettable / detritus that my children will throw away / as I did my mother’s souvenirs of trips / with my dead father, Kodaks of kittens, and bundles of cards from her mother Kate.”

That is the book’s first poem, called “The Things.” It is the flavor and aroma of the whole of the book’s best work. Bluntly honest, sharply observed, redolent with perspective. These are neither poems of defiance nor submission but of witness. Hall is aware and impatient. In one poem called “Envy” he describes his elderly dog’s life and demise, envious of “the instant mercy of pentobarbital.” In another he notes “My son took from my house / the eight-sided Mossberg 22 / my father gave me when I was twelve.” These are details of mood and cautions taken, noted without self-pity but a compassionate, clinical truth telling. In his late seventies, early eighties Hall could fuck, could write without limitation, could get about in the world with assistance and be pissed at condescension and fallen status (work removed from university anthologies). But there is less every day.

In a poem called “Sleep,” Hall writes:

The engine / of exhaustion / decelerates / slowly, pulling / its eighteen / wheels up / the mountain / as I lie twisted / on my feather / bed. The truck / rattles, whines / downshifts / metal on metal / obdurate / in its pitted skin, / while I long for / stupor, my body / ticking a dirge / of stoppage.”

His stubbornness and courage as a witness and a persistent craftsman to his own high standards inspires. Unless lightning, a shark or some sudden accident or crime gets us, this is each our fate at our own mortal pace and circumstance.

It is good to have such a mind and such a work of art to serve as our Virgil. There is no quit in Hall, only loss and recognition. He writes, still, what he can, not poetry anymore but continued prose. He continues to watch his beloved Red Sox, to mourn his two-decades gone wife, Jane Kenyon, to correspond with friends and to observe the present and survey the past, where the back chambers of his mind are filled with stories that cover his life but go back to parents, grandparents, great uncles and aunts who connect his life to those that pre-dated him, as his work connects to ours and to those who will come after us, grateful for Mr. Hall’s life and work.

[Diane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Donald Hall is my favorite poet and I savored this book for months. He's 83 years old now and one has to wonder how many poetry collections will be coming from him in the future. (This last book was 10 years in the making.) The subjects are his usual... love, lust, New Hampshire, family, friends and baseball. No one can evoke the mood of New England like Professor Hall. No one can write about the minutiae of life and make it so large. Although there is a great deal of musing about old age and death this collection also has humor and irony ( one stanza,
"....picking up a thesaurus, trying to find a metaphor-
and makes a doddery language with no poetry in it.
If no one will ever read him again, what the fuck?")

My favorite poems are often about his late wife, Jane Kenyon and there's a lovely one called ENVY about euthanizing his dog. This ten year collection shows a wide range of subjects and will endure through time. I don't think Professor Hall needs to worry that no one will read him again.

[Holly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love, love, love Donald Hall. His book, Without, has always been my all-time favorite book of poetry, and it still is, but The Back Chamber is certainly in my top 5. I won't lie, though. His descriptions of having sex freaked me out just a tad. I mean, come on, it's like your grandfather talking about sex! But that's also why I loved the book. We're all aging and although you don't want to think about old people having sex, don't you also hope that you're having sex when you're old? Yes!

Hall also wrote more poems about his wife, Jane Kenyon, and her death and what she would have thought about him today if she was alive. He wrote about his home, his family, his aging body. It was just fantastic. If you like poetry, go borrow this from the library or go buy it. If you're ready to dip your toes into reading poetry, go get this. Hell, if you just want a good story? You should read this, too.

[Sa Riz · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Creative Writing"

Translating Virgil, eighty lines a day,
Keats never did pick up his MFA.


This is Donald Hall at his best. The book suffused with the loss of his wife, my favorite poet, Jane Kenyon. His vision of their daily relationship reads quite idyllic....both writing in separate rooms, coffee together, love making, back to writing or gardening or chores. We miss Kenyon's searing voice and imagery; how much must he miss her companionship. Hall doesn't sugarcoat it and perceives it all, memory, nostalgic, loss.

But more than half the book is about other things, all interesting and closely observed. Some quite funny, like the couplet quoted above. Like the kids might say, he does 'snark' well.

[Joan Colby · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s quite a disparity of quality in these poems written by Hall in his late 70’s and 80’s, as might be expected. Those dealing with the death of his wife Jane Kenyon are touching as are those which talk of age and its inroads. Hall never sentimentalizes, yet the poems are wrenching. The long narrative poem of Ric the philanderer and his successive marriages, divorce, and relationships is good. I was particularly taken by Hall’s observation that alcoholics think they can control their drinking, then the booze takes over, and similarly philanderers think casual affairs will continue endlessly, then catastrophe: they fall in love.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not a Donald Hall fan, but knowing this is the last volume of poems this man will write or publish, at least according to him, imbues them with something deeper and sadder than perhaps they possess on their own. A good many deal with coming to terms with the limitations one faces as one ages, the diminishing of one's abilities as a writer, the traces of what had once been bountiful in the bloom of life and nature as one faces winter in a lonely landscape, bereft of friends and lovers and the passion necessary to survive in such isolation without even the comfort of one's own voice.

Some of the poems included are the best of Hall.

[Taube · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Poetry and Ambition"

He sits to pick at lines that try to become a poem
in the Morris chair his mother and father gave him
when he wrote after school with his bedroom door shut.

At fourteen he resolved to become an immortal poet.
In middle age he won prizes, honors, fellowships,
and read his poems at colleges hundreds of times.

Then it stopped. The anthologies dropped him out.
Poetry festivals never invited him. An octogenarian
sit in the blond maple chair writing, crossing out,

picking up a thesaurus, trying to find a metaphor--
and makes a doddery language with no poetry in it.
If no one will read him again, what the fuck?

[Phil · Rating 5 out of 5]

I one was new to Hall this book would seem sparse, shabby, and a bit creaky around the edges. And to me that is the point. It is like looking at a back chamber full of remnants from the past. It is like that ramshackle storage shack falling down in his backyard....the setting sun rubbing up against it....some marvellous imagery here. I like the fact there is a wide variety of subjects here as well. Highly recommended if you like and have followed Hall. Not for a new reader of Hall or his work or if you are new to reading poetry.

[E.J. Cullen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hall, now 80, lives in an old house far out in the country, a house that, through generations, was obviously bequeathed to him. To my mind, this is altogether fitting and proper for an old poet. Like Billy Collins, he's straightforward and readable, unlike the myriad of sometimes pretentious incestual academics currently practicing. Not the creme-de-la creme of poetic ambition, but real, still searching, still learning. Nothing wrong with that.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I am supposed to idolize Donald Hall's poetry, but so much of it missed me (didn't even stir an emotion lurking at the bottom of mhy spleen) that I cam away unsatisfied. "Ric's Progress" was a shocker and worth reading the book just for that one long poem. I'll try to keep an open mind and read a couple more books of his poems.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a poem in here with the same cadence as Ox-Cart Man, Hall's children's book. But these poems are a long way from being for children. The last line of a poem about outliving his own celebrity: "If no one will ever read him again, what the fuck?"
This is what I love about Donald Hall.