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Eagle Pond: The Complete Essays on New Hampshire Farm Life, Nature, and the Poet Jane Kenyon
This original paperback brings together for the first time all of Donald Hall’s writing on Eagle Pond Farm, his ancestral home in New Hampshire, where he visited his grandparents as a young boy and then lived with his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, until her death. It includes the entire, previously published Seasons at Eagle Pond and Here at Eagle Pond; the poem “Daylilies on the Hill” from The Painted Bed; and several uncollected pieces. In these tender essays, Hall tells of the joys and quiddities of life on the farm, the pleasures and discomforts of a world in which the year has four seasons -- maple sugar, blackfly, Red Sox, and winter. Lyrical, comic, and elegaic, they sing of a landscape and culture that are disappearing under the assault of change.
272 pages, Paperback
First published April 4, 2007
10 people are currently reading
105 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 - 21 of 21 reviews
April 22, 2020
Donald Hall was Poet Laureate in the early ‘00s.
This book is prose with the exception of a short section. There are thirty of his writings here related to his life and ancestral home at Eagle Pond, New Hampshire.
The first third of the book covers his writings on the four seasons at the farm. It spans many years as he visits his childhood. This is far and away the best section of the book. The writing is perfect.
The middle third of the book covers a variety of topics related to his family history and local politics. This section was not so relatable or beautiful, although I did enjoy the tongue and cheek essay ‘Reasons for Hating Vermont’. It seems there is some competition between Vermont and New Hampshire as to who lives in the better state.
The final third of the book is entitled News from Eagle Pond and is very good. My favorite stories were the Darkened Parlor and Graveyard People. I had no idea that it was customary when a person died for a family member to stay in the parlor with the dead, until the burial the following day.
5 stars. I love Donald Hall’s writing. This book is a little uneven but his gems in this book are some of the best.
This book is prose with the exception of a short section. There are thirty of his writings here related to his life and ancestral home at Eagle Pond, New Hampshire.
The first third of the book covers his writings on the four seasons at the farm. It spans many years as he visits his childhood. This is far and away the best section of the book. The writing is perfect.
The middle third of the book covers a variety of topics related to his family history and local politics. This section was not so relatable or beautiful, although I did enjoy the tongue and cheek essay ‘Reasons for Hating Vermont’. It seems there is some competition between Vermont and New Hampshire as to who lives in the better state.
The final third of the book is entitled News from Eagle Pond and is very good. My favorite stories were the Darkened Parlor and Graveyard People. I had no idea that it was customary when a person died for a family member to stay in the parlor with the dead, until the burial the following day.
5 stars. I love Donald Hall’s writing. This book is a little uneven but his gems in this book are some of the best.
December 15, 2014
When I saw Donald Hall's photo on the cover of "Poets and Writers Magazine," I was surprised to learn that his Eagle Pond sanctuary was next door to a family estate in Bristol, New Hampshire. It is possible in reading "Eagle Pond" to vector into his location on Route 4 because he has offered such a rich sense of place that he covers his territory with precision and insight much like a surveyor or a farmer mending a stone wall with a neighbor in spring. There is the gentleman farmer about this poet and he seems steeped in the Breadloaf School tradition of Robert Frost in that his poetry is vivid, realistic and naturalistic in the same way, for example, that Seamus Heaney wants you to understand rural Ireland first-hand. Donald Hall is more than infatuated, he's in love with the sense of place which New Hampshire uniquely affords. He views many parts of this state as authentically American with roots tracing back to the Revolution among soldiers who fought and then moved north to carve out hard lives by yanking granite boulders from their fields, cutting back the woods and farming. He's right: you need to be a hardy soul to persevere in the winters of deep snow and 30 below zero wind chills. He is sensitive to the history of the place and the contributions that past generations have made and upon whose shoulders he now stands. This is an erudite soul: Harvard, Oxford, Stanford and yet he eschews the wealth and privilege normally associated with such elite bastions of learning. This is a Poet Laureate of the Common Man with a Walt Whitman face like the Old Man of the Mountain: the language is clear, precise, inspired and lyrical. There is definitely redundancy among the essays, which may require some patience, but I preferred to view them as leitmotifs, which repeat for emphasis and improvisation like a jazz standard. I would have edited this work differently to eliminate some of the redundancies of stand-alone pieces combined into a single anthology but so what? Hall complains a great deal about Flatlanders, who drive their BMWs up to the country when the weather is fair to escape the heat and complexity of life in the big city in Boston and New York during July and August, and to ski at Ragged Mountain during winter holidays. Yet Hall is a Flatlander whose roots spring north, leaning toward the light, from Hamden, CT, near New Haven. He has a great deal to say about Woodstock, Vermont, of which he is not an admirer and about developers who build condos after tearing down what is ancient and, therefore, authentic in New England in order to erect pseudo-Yankee retirement dwellings for those who come from away and don't seem to know any better. I was surprised to hear a Poet Laureate badmouth his next door New England neighbors with such vehemence but there it was in print for all the world to see. Donald Hall wants you to know what it means to live authentically in New Hampshire and what it's like to attend Old Home Week and Town Meetings and meet at the Grange. He wants you to know about the railroad, which is no longer there, and what it means to suffer as a long-time Red Sox fan even among the greatness of Ted Williams, Jackie Jenson and Carl Yazstremski. The net effect of the writing is that he presents a quaint and disappearing provincial view of old Yankee New Hampshire, mournful for its passing as its past was so rich and quaint and authentic. The most intriguing innovation in this writing appeared in his chapter entitled "Fifty People Talking" which delivers a few sentences of narrative spoken in their natural dialect about their quotidian lives near Eagle Pond in Danbury, Andover, Wilmot Flats, New London and Bristol. This is genuinely inspired writing as one perceives in the text and context of the pure narrative the real authenticity that he seeks all along in "Eagle Pond." William Gaddis took a similar approach in his genius work, "JR," which helped him to win a couple of National Book Awards. He writes about typically New England subjects such as black flies, maple sugar season, blizzards, stone walls, the American Revolution and Civil War, rural Republican tradition, clearing the land, keeping up a farm house, progress or the lack thereof, the seasons, especially autumn and winter, city folks, the Red Sox, church, Yankee history, relics of bygone days, cellar holes, his dog, Gus, local haunts for breakfast, Mt. Kearsage and Ragged Mountain, back roads, newspaper delivery, Yankee thrift and ingenuity, the lengths to which forefathers went to survive self-reliantly, surveying land by compass, gathering hay and everyday conversations with neighbors. The net effect of this book is to give one a strong, positive sense of place about Eagle Pond in New Hampshire and Hall accomplishes this feat admirably just as Frost and Heaney do in their poetry and as Faulkner did in his fiction. If you ever wondered what it's like to live as a rugged individualist in the woods of New England, then read Thoreau, Robert Frost and Donald Hall. "Eagle Pond" is a beautiful book and only a great writer could have crafted it so nobly and with such a rich sensibility for a place where authentic old Yankee America suffers to endure.
February 18, 2025
Reread a fave from 30 years ago...a needed balm during a brutal start to 2025. Hall's poetry is powerful but I actually preferred his work as an essayist and the Four Seasons at Eagle Pond included in this collection, written in part while fighting cancer and he wasn't sure if he'd ever return, are among his best.
June 5, 2019
Essays with a setting of Eagle Pond, the family farm where Hall and his wife Jane decide to make their home. A former Poet Laureate, Hall’s essays are as captivating as his poetry and his evocation of Eagle Pond and the ways and mores of the past are always fascinating.
September 18, 2025
En la traducción al castellano es un poemario que recoge una selección de versos de dos poetas norteamericanos, Jane Kenyon y Donald Hall, muy laureados que escribieron a finales del siglo XX y que convivieron juntos cerca de veinte años en una casa construida a principios del siglo XIX, junto a una laguna descrita siempre como muy hermosa, en Wilmot, New Hampshire. Una casa llamada “Eagle Pond”, que traducido al castellano sería “La laguna del águila”, convertida en una referencia simbólica en la obra de los dos poetas.
Es la suya una poesía de la experiencia, de la cotidianeidad, muy sencilla, llena de remembranzas, de idealización del pasado y de la naturaleza que les rodea…
Leer sus poemas es como asistir a un diálogo e inmiscuirse en el interior, en la intimidad de dos vidas compartidas que a modo de diálogo poético o poesía epistolar se muestra en toda su autenticidad.
Sigue mis reseñas en:
Es la suya una poesía de la experiencia, de la cotidianeidad, muy sencilla, llena de remembranzas, de idealización del pasado y de la naturaleza que les rodea…
Leer sus poemas es como asistir a un diálogo e inmiscuirse en el interior, en la intimidad de dos vidas compartidas que a modo de diálogo poético o poesía epistolar se muestra en toda su autenticidad.
Sigue mis reseñas en:
November 3, 2023
This is a collection of essays about New Hampshire and the place Hall -- a former poet laureate (he has passed away recently) spent summers in as a boy. He returned as an adult and lived in NH ever since in the farmhouse his grandparents had when he was a boy. There's a lot of nostalgic writing here about subsistence farming, Yankee sensibility, and can be sentimental too at times; some of the essays are stronger than others. It's worth a read but you can skip a few essays, too. It certainly gives a portrait of a way of life now gone, but Hall isn't too sad about it. As I grew up nearby it was easy for me to get into this, but might not be for others.
March 28, 2025
Jane Kenyon habla de días cotidianos. De fantasmas enlutados, de puertas de hospital, de diagnósticos, de melancolía y azules, de trigo y tractores, de madre, de hermano, de los pequeños gestos tan pequeños que son inmensos. Leo y escucho a Walt Whitman, a Sylvia Plath. Qué bonito descubrimiento, leer cerca de un lago en un día de otoño.
Y su marido, un Donald Hald que mira igual de incisivo, hablando con sus personajes, atrapando instantes cotidianos con lírica y verdad; hablando de la edad, como si con la poesía no fuese menos cierta la realidad, la vida se nos escapa entre las manos. Un bonito poemario conjunto
Y su marido, un Donald Hald que mira igual de incisivo, hablando con sus personajes, atrapando instantes cotidianos con lírica y verdad; hablando de la edad, como si con la poesía no fuese menos cierta la realidad, la vida se nos escapa entre las manos. Un bonito poemario conjunto
January 14, 2020
This is a very good collection of old fashioned essays. They provide a colorful overview of Hall and his Route 4 New Hampshire world. Be sure to watch the Bill Moyers special on YouTube for a richer experience.
July 25, 2018
enjoyed his sketches of life in rural New England brings back memories of my grandparents farm currently owned by my aunt in Pembroke NY
October 24, 2018
I truly love the way he writes. I have a feeling I will read his books again someday.
March 18, 2021
Loved taking a walk with you in NH where I too love. RIP and thanks for sharing. Just why did you set your alarm clock. Why didn't you let your body wake when it wanted to in your retirement years.
December 31, 2021
I loved these pieces. The author writes about his beloved homestead and its people and places in New Hampshire. These are beautiful little pieces celebrating the land, the history and the people.
September 19, 2011
I mostly loved "Eagle Pond," but before I get into that, here's why I went with only four stars - Donald Hall overdoes it sometimes. The book is a collection of essays about why DH loves his ancestral farmhouse in New Hampshire, and a defense of rural life. Maybe this is just what happens when poets take on prose writing, but sometimes DH came across as a bit too romantic and nostalgic.
Eagle Pond sounds like a delightful place to live, despite the spookiness that often permeates big old houses that have been in a single family for generations. DH spent his childhood summers at the house with his grandparents, and eventually came to live there himself with his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, after his grandmother passed away in the 1970s. One of the main ideas that stuck with me is the notion of living somewhere solely because you love the place fiercely. DH explains that this is a very un-American thing; we are a people constantly focused on progress and self-betterment, and more often than not, greater success can be found somewhere other than where you currently reside. Certainly this has been the way my life has unfolded thus far, and I know I am not alone. What DH finds sad about this mindset is that it prevents people from retaining ties to the old people in their lives (DH calls them "golden codgers"), our main sources of oral history. Also, when people leave, ancestral homes and relics eventually wither away, actions that the people of rural New Hampshire view as just short of criminal. (When DH and his wife move back and, bit by bit, begin restoring the house at Eagle Pond, strangers came up to them and thanked them.) One of my favorite parts of the book is when DH describes the "back chamber" of the old house - a room full of treasures that various ancestors kept and stored away for one reason or another (likely because the thought they'd come in handy someday). Upon discovering a 1917 agricultural bulletin that his grandmother Kate held onto, DH asserts, "My wonder is not for the things themselves, but for the saving of them."
I don't know much about my family history. I plan on leaving New York in two years, after having lived in the city for nine years straight - the longest I've lived anywhere - in order to attend graduate school. How typically American of me. I don't plan on re-thinking my (vague) graduate school plans, but this point in my life (recently engaged) presents a good opportunity to think about where and how to settle. I don't regret the way I grew up, bouncing from place to place, always far away from my extended family - this lifestyle indeed allowed me to achieve many personal successes. However, reading "Eagle Pond" has convinced me that there is something special about being deeply connected to a place and its dead, and I think I'd like to impose this experience upon my descendants.
Eagle Pond sounds like a delightful place to live, despite the spookiness that often permeates big old houses that have been in a single family for generations. DH spent his childhood summers at the house with his grandparents, and eventually came to live there himself with his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, after his grandmother passed away in the 1970s. One of the main ideas that stuck with me is the notion of living somewhere solely because you love the place fiercely. DH explains that this is a very un-American thing; we are a people constantly focused on progress and self-betterment, and more often than not, greater success can be found somewhere other than where you currently reside. Certainly this has been the way my life has unfolded thus far, and I know I am not alone. What DH finds sad about this mindset is that it prevents people from retaining ties to the old people in their lives (DH calls them "golden codgers"), our main sources of oral history. Also, when people leave, ancestral homes and relics eventually wither away, actions that the people of rural New Hampshire view as just short of criminal. (When DH and his wife move back and, bit by bit, begin restoring the house at Eagle Pond, strangers came up to them and thanked them.) One of my favorite parts of the book is when DH describes the "back chamber" of the old house - a room full of treasures that various ancestors kept and stored away for one reason or another (likely because the thought they'd come in handy someday). Upon discovering a 1917 agricultural bulletin that his grandmother Kate held onto, DH asserts, "My wonder is not for the things themselves, but for the saving of them."
I don't know much about my family history. I plan on leaving New York in two years, after having lived in the city for nine years straight - the longest I've lived anywhere - in order to attend graduate school. How typically American of me. I don't plan on re-thinking my (vague) graduate school plans, but this point in my life (recently engaged) presents a good opportunity to think about where and how to settle. I don't regret the way I grew up, bouncing from place to place, always far away from my extended family - this lifestyle indeed allowed me to achieve many personal successes. However, reading "Eagle Pond" has convinced me that there is something special about being deeply connected to a place and its dead, and I think I'd like to impose this experience upon my descendants.
December 26, 2011
Not necessarily a book I would normally have picked up for myself, but Elise read it and thought I would like it too. It is a collection of (almost all) prose by the poet Donald Hall about living in an ancestral home in rural New Hampshire. I did enjoy it. I feel a certain attraction to living in the country, which hall clearly shares and plays upon with many nostalgic images. I especially enjoyed the essay about "mass class" and "class rusticus" (don't remember the name off the top of my head) and the one called "Grandfathering." Occasionally Hall grated on me with sentimentality that I thought went a little overboard, or with his predilection for poetic lists of the puffs, powders, patches, Bibles, billet-doux variety. I wish he had written a bit more interrogatively about the experience of being an "outsider" who made the active choice to move to the country, but I guess I can't blame him for not writing the book I wish he had written.
April 1, 2013
Combines two shorter books of essays, Seasons at Eagle Pond and Here at Eagle Pond, plus a long poem and some new essays. Should be read slowly, over time, like the changing of the seasons described in this book. Touches on history, changing rurality, land use, farming, suburbanization, generational family life and legacy, storytelling, and other themes. The book contains occasional repetition, but it is repetition that allows reconsideration of a motif, much like in music. This book should be required reading for residents and other denizens of New Hampshire, and high on the list for New Englanders of all sorts, those who find escape in nature, and residents of the rural South, who may find that they have more in common with Yankees than they thought.
February 12, 2012
This is one of several books on my Donald Hall shelf that has been given to me by our dear friend Pete W., himself a worshipful transplant to New Hampshire. Pete and I share an abiding passion for DH, whether he is writing about the Red Sox, about his grandfather's hired hand, about black fly season, or about love and loss.
October 5, 2020
Lovely, lyrical, a pleasure to savor. Moving essays about New England people, the land they love and and that loves them back. Hints of Didion, McPhee and Kitty Robertson (a lesser known but beautiful writer, particularly about New England in general and her hometown, Ipswich)
August 1, 2013
Notes:
funny, quirky, beautiful
found out the origin of Ox-Cart Man (kids book)
enjoyed the first half more than the last
compilation of other books/stories
funny, quirky, beautiful
found out the origin of Ox-Cart Man (kids book)
enjoyed the first half more than the last
compilation of other books/stories
November 10, 2019
A lovely book written by a” golden codger” bringing a particular history alive.
August 28, 2007
Perfect nature writing. Love you, Don!
September 8, 2011
eh. Should try his poetry, I guess.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews