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White Apples And The Taste Of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006
This retrospective collection of verse from the former US poet laureate and National Medal of Arts winner spans six decades of celebrated work.Throughout his writing life Donald Hall has garnered numerous accolades and honors, culminating in 2006 with his appointment as poet laureate of the United States. White Apples and the Taste of Stone collects more than two hundred poems from across sixty years of Hall’s celebrated career, and includes poems published in The New Yorker, the American Poetry Review, and the New York Times.Those who have come to love Donald Hall's poetry will welcome this vital and important addition to his body of work. For the uninitiated it is a spectacular introduction to this critically acclaimed and admired poet.
- GenresPoetryCollections
460 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 3, 2006
51 people are currently reading
383 people want to read
About the author
Donald Hall
180 books201 followersDonald 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
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
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
September 14, 2024
It feels odd to find old reviews I wrote of people who are now dead. And odd to think of Hall, a great elegist, dead. This big Selected Poems was later replaced by a much more streamlined Selected, and that was probably rights. Still, I like the sheer size of this book. Here's a thing I wrote about it 10 years ago:
Donald Hall, Poet Laureate of the United States in 2006-2007, and Ann Arborite Jane Kenyon, his second wife and an extraordinary poet in her own right, left Ann Arbor in 1975 to move to Hall’s ancestral home in rural New Hampshire. Although Hall wrote “Kicking the Leaves,” one of the best poems I know that is based at least partially in Ann Arbor, he does not, by and large, speak very fondly of this place nor of his time at the U-M, where he returns for a reading at 5 p.m. today in the U-M Museum of Art’s Helmut Stern Auditorium.
The place Hall does write about obsessively and often brilliantly is that farmhouse in New England, about the land around it and the people who have lived and worked there. His recent, massive book of selected poems, White Apples and the Taste of Stone, which picks from sixty years of work, circles round and about that farm. In one of the very early poems, Hall elegizes his ancestor: “Against the clapboards and the window panes / The loud March whines with rain and heavy wind, / In dark New Hampshire where his widow wakes.” Four hundred pages and sixty years later, the poet, now in his eighties, hears the same wind: “In October the red leaves going brown heap and scatter / over hayfield and dirt road, over garden and circular drive.”
The close observation of that place has created a unified vision that moves through all of Hall’s long life, one that has been devoted to his art. He has tried lots of different forms, both in poetry and prose; he has adopted different voices, some purely narrative, others meditative, or for a short period almost surrealistic; but he has always come back to that house and his memories of it. That unity allows the reader to move through White Apples and the Taste of Stone from beginning to end, almost the way one would read a novel or memoir.
Donald Hall is quite possibly the premier American elegist. His memories of the people gone before him are continually revivified by his life in the house those people built. When he and Kenyon returned to live there, their life together became part of the fabric of that place. And when Kenyon died at the age of forty-seven from leukemia, the place and Hall’s keen knowledge of elegy combined to make powerful tributes that will almost certainly continue to be read and quoted. In a poem addressed to his dead wife that reflects on her garden and the view from the place they both loved, Hall writes,
I paced beside the weeds
and snowy peonies, staring at Mount Kearsarge
where you climbed wearing purple hiking boots.
“Hurry back. Be careful, climbing down.”
Your peonies lean their vast heads westward
as if they might topple. Some topple.
In the specifics of Hall’s place and his losses, we find emotions we all share.
https://annarborobserver.com/articles...
Donald Hall, Poet Laureate of the United States in 2006-2007, and Ann Arborite Jane Kenyon, his second wife and an extraordinary poet in her own right, left Ann Arbor in 1975 to move to Hall’s ancestral home in rural New Hampshire. Although Hall wrote “Kicking the Leaves,” one of the best poems I know that is based at least partially in Ann Arbor, he does not, by and large, speak very fondly of this place nor of his time at the U-M, where he returns for a reading at 5 p.m. today in the U-M Museum of Art’s Helmut Stern Auditorium.
The place Hall does write about obsessively and often brilliantly is that farmhouse in New England, about the land around it and the people who have lived and worked there. His recent, massive book of selected poems, White Apples and the Taste of Stone, which picks from sixty years of work, circles round and about that farm. In one of the very early poems, Hall elegizes his ancestor: “Against the clapboards and the window panes / The loud March whines with rain and heavy wind, / In dark New Hampshire where his widow wakes.” Four hundred pages and sixty years later, the poet, now in his eighties, hears the same wind: “In October the red leaves going brown heap and scatter / over hayfield and dirt road, over garden and circular drive.”
The close observation of that place has created a unified vision that moves through all of Hall’s long life, one that has been devoted to his art. He has tried lots of different forms, both in poetry and prose; he has adopted different voices, some purely narrative, others meditative, or for a short period almost surrealistic; but he has always come back to that house and his memories of it. That unity allows the reader to move through White Apples and the Taste of Stone from beginning to end, almost the way one would read a novel or memoir.
Donald Hall is quite possibly the premier American elegist. His memories of the people gone before him are continually revivified by his life in the house those people built. When he and Kenyon returned to live there, their life together became part of the fabric of that place. And when Kenyon died at the age of forty-seven from leukemia, the place and Hall’s keen knowledge of elegy combined to make powerful tributes that will almost certainly continue to be read and quoted. In a poem addressed to his dead wife that reflects on her garden and the view from the place they both loved, Hall writes,
I paced beside the weeds
and snowy peonies, staring at Mount Kearsarge
where you climbed wearing purple hiking boots.
“Hurry back. Be careful, climbing down.”
Your peonies lean their vast heads westward
as if they might topple. Some topple.
In the specifics of Hall’s place and his losses, we find emotions we all share.
https://annarborobserver.com/articles...
July 2, 2007
Donald Hall is one of those poets whom poets know but non-poets have and will never hear of. Some of the things he has written can tear right through you--the poems about his family experiences, especially. But he often gets bogged down in the Academic shuffle--the guys who like to write long winded poems which mean little or anything beyond some arcane event the poet doesn't bother to explain.
Still, Hall is a craftsman, and a good one. If you are a poet, you need to read through this book to get the timber of his language and the craft of his verse. But this is NOT a book for neophytes who think poetry should actually come right out and say something. It's for the more subtle of mind and sophisticated of taste.
Still, Hall is a craftsman, and a good one. If you are a poet, you need to read through this book to get the timber of his language and the craft of his verse. But this is NOT a book for neophytes who think poetry should actually come right out and say something. It's for the more subtle of mind and sophisticated of taste.
March 23, 2011
Lingered over this one and listened to the CD of Donald Hall reading his poems. So much beauty here. "Names of Horses" and "Great Day in the Cow's House" are two of my all-time favorites -- remind me of why I write poems.
Want to read
September 1, 2009I was lucky enough to have this wonderful man come to my elementary school each year to read us classic poetry as well as some of his own wonderous pieces. Little did we know then how famous he would become.
He has the BEST reading voice. Listen to some of his readings if you EVER get a change.
I'll never forget him reading Casey at the Bat or The Raven. Gives me chills still.
He has the BEST reading voice. Listen to some of his readings if you EVER get a change.
I'll never forget him reading Casey at the Bat or The Raven. Gives me chills still.
September 8, 2015
Though I won't reread the entire collection, I'll return to these:
My Son My Executioner
Dancers
O Cheese
Names of Horses
Merle Bascom's .22
Edward's Anecdote
The One Day: A Poem in Three Parts (1988)
Tubes
The Night of the Day
The Museum of Clear Ideas (1993)
The Old Life (1996)
My Son My Executioner
Dancers
O Cheese
Names of Horses
Merle Bascom's .22
Edward's Anecdote
The One Day: A Poem in Three Parts (1988)
Tubes
The Night of the Day
The Museum of Clear Ideas (1993)
The Old Life (1996)
November 20, 2024
The poems about grief are extraordinary. Otherwise, too much baseball.
July 17, 2018
As part of my ongoing memorial to Donald Hall, the poet laureate who died recently at the age of 89, I read this collection selected from poems he wrote from 1946 to 2006.
Most of Hall's work is autobiographical, and I don't tire reading of his childhood memories, memories of growing up in Connecticut, summers on his grandparents' farm in New Hampshire, his early working life, his life with poet Jane Kenyon, and life after her death. Sometimes he gets just a bit cynical, and I don't like that as much; his grief over Jane Kenyon's death is everyone's grief.
The CD at the back of the book allowed me to hear Hall read his poems, inflecting the feelings I might miss.
Someone, perhaps doing research, who borrowed this book from our public library had jotted nine page numbers on the front page of the book. I went back to reread the poems selected and discovered the reader had noted a theme next to most of them: time, nature, death, and missing Jane Kenyon. Two were left without annotation, and I thought they were about death. Imagine. I had a poetry discussion with an imaginary person. I don't want to return this book to the library just yet.
Most of Hall's work is autobiographical, and I don't tire reading of his childhood memories, memories of growing up in Connecticut, summers on his grandparents' farm in New Hampshire, his early working life, his life with poet Jane Kenyon, and life after her death. Sometimes he gets just a bit cynical, and I don't like that as much; his grief over Jane Kenyon's death is everyone's grief.
The CD at the back of the book allowed me to hear Hall read his poems, inflecting the feelings I might miss.
Someone, perhaps doing research, who borrowed this book from our public library had jotted nine page numbers on the front page of the book. I went back to reread the poems selected and discovered the reader had noted a theme next to most of them: time, nature, death, and missing Jane Kenyon. Two were left without annotation, and I thought they were about death. Imagine. I had a poetry discussion with an imaginary person. I don't want to return this book to the library just yet.
June 4, 2019
The Great Rambler Donald Hall...
The jacket of book claims that he has achieved aching eloquence, but perhaps more for a lack thereof than any real command of eloquence. Its is shocking that one man has made a whole career of making unpolished poetry, many of his poems suffer from having untidy form. He is like Louise Gluck in a sense he is too wrapped in the pretense of wanting to be great, but like many American poets he has no perspective about the discipline of Poetry. His chief accomplishment is that he includes any subject into his poems no matter how mundane, anything is free game whether it is name dropping NPR or Queen Elizabeth.
The jacket of book claims that he has achieved aching eloquence, but perhaps more for a lack thereof than any real command of eloquence. Its is shocking that one man has made a whole career of making unpolished poetry, many of his poems suffer from having untidy form. He is like Louise Gluck in a sense he is too wrapped in the pretense of wanting to be great, but like many American poets he has no perspective about the discipline of Poetry. His chief accomplishment is that he includes any subject into his poems no matter how mundane, anything is free game whether it is name dropping NPR or Queen Elizabeth.
February 1, 2019
"Distressed Haiku"
In a week or ten days
the snow and ice
will melt from Cemetery Road.
I’m coming! Don’t move!
You think that their
dying is the worst
thing that could happen.
Then they stay dead.
Will Hall ever write
lines that do anything
but whine and complain?
The mouse rips
the throat of the lion.
The Boston Red Sox win
a hundred straight games
and the dead return.
-Donald Hall
In a week or ten days
the snow and ice
will melt from Cemetery Road.
I’m coming! Don’t move!
You think that their
dying is the worst
thing that could happen.
Then they stay dead.
Will Hall ever write
lines that do anything
but whine and complain?
The mouse rips
the throat of the lion.
The Boston Red Sox win
a hundred straight games
and the dead return.
-Donald Hall
May 7, 2019
Great compendium of his poetry. Very diverse in subject matter and styles. Recommended for lovers of poetry.
October 9, 2019
His writing really speaks to me with his descriptions and messages as well as it makes sense which some poetry does not. Especially reassuring are his poems on grief.
January 9, 2014
Great poet. Great collection. Here's one of my favorites, "Deathwork":
http://books.google.com/books?id=c8Y3...
You can hear Donald Hall read "Deathwork" here ("Deathwork" starts about 4 minutes and 40 seconds into the recording):
http://media.sas.upenn.edu/Pennsound/...
http://books.google.com/books?id=c8Y3...
You can hear Donald Hall read "Deathwork" here ("Deathwork" starts about 4 minutes and 40 seconds into the recording):
http://media.sas.upenn.edu/Pennsound/...
October 13, 2009
Currently reading bits and pieces during National Poetry Month 2009.
My thoughts so far:
1. Like his work a lot;
2. Find him incredibly depressing
# # # Update, 10/13/09:
I'm never going to "finish" this in the traditional sense. Who sits down and reads a poetry volume of this size from front to back without a break?
Good stuff. Will keep going back to it. I'm trying to read a poem a day...
My thoughts so far:
1. Like his work a lot;
2. Find him incredibly depressing
# # # Update, 10/13/09:
I'm never going to "finish" this in the traditional sense. Who sits down and reads a poetry volume of this size from front to back without a break?
Good stuff. Will keep going back to it. I'm trying to read a poem a day...
July 2, 2012
I read about half of this collection (about 200 pages) and came to truly appreciate Donald Hall's poetry. I wrote several poems while I was reading this that were directly inspired by Hall's work. Unfortunately, I just don't have time to continue with this book for now. I hope to someday return to this poetry.
October 25, 2010
An excellent set compilation of poems from our greatest living poet. The book comes with a CD of Donald Hall reading some of his poems, which is great. Affirmation, The Wish, and Dread are particular favorites.
September 17, 2007
A vast collection from an essential (American) poet. "The Ox-Cart Man" still stands as one of the most perfectly constructed, enjoyable poems in my mind, my old heart.
February 9, 2011
Oh boy, do I love his poems!
July 18, 2008
A beautiful, sad, tribute to an America lost, to life passing, to the inevitability of change. Donald Hall was U.S. Poet Lauriette (sp?) in .. 2007 I think.
December 1, 2008
Whimsical one moment and then devastating the next but enjoyable every single one. A must for poets.
August 31, 2008
What can I say? Donald Hall was a poet laureate of the US, for a reason. He's a keeper. Actually made me cry. There's a great podcast of a poetry reading by him as well, if you can get it.
February 24, 2009
I like Donald Hall and this collection is pretty good, although I think it could have been given a more appealing design.
March 15, 2013
Sort of does the job. What's the job?
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews