The death of Donald Hall comes at a moment when his poetry feels newly relevant. Hall's hospitable poems, which approach difficult ideas in the idioms of common speech, defend the sense and meaning of ordinary language from the daily barrage of a debased and weaponized English. At a time when straightforward “tough talk” is giving popular license to open racism, sexism, and anti-intellectualism, Hall's poetry instead revels in the surprising insights of trivial observations and confronts the anguish of ubiquitous death and loss.
A poet's personal life offers irresistible fodder for interpretation, and Hall's has been no exception. Hall, who moved from a faculty position at the University of Michigan to a New Hampshire farmhouse in the mid-1970s, where he lived until his death on Saturday, has often been regionalized as a New England farmer-poet with “barnyard credibility” and nostalgic impulses.
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