Eagle Pond [Paperback]

When I was growing up in suburban New York, my parents sent me to a summer camp in rural New Hampshire for a number of summers. During these summers, I fell in love with the beauty and ruggedness of New Hampshire. I spent my summers riding horses, hiking mountains and swimming in ice cold lakes. I also spent my summers swatting mosquitoes and battling poison ivy. Donald Hall's anthology, Eagle Pond, brought back memories of these summers long gone, evoking memories both sweet and bitter-sweet. Hall's writing is lyrical and poetic, using words sparingly to evoke sounds, thoughts and memories. His commentary on the shallowness of our lives when they are based purely on the present and lack historical depth is right on target.

I wish that I had read Hall's works separately. Unfortunately, they do not work too well together in anthology form. There is too much repetition, which sometimes gets annoying. This repetition is necessary if each volume stands alone, but it becomes redundant in anthology form. This does not decrease the beauty of the writing, but it does lessen the beauty of the book as a whole.

I attended elementary school in a New Orleans suburb. Because we only had three seasons (summer, July and August), events like leaves turning colors in the fall or snow were theoretical concepts unless one traveled north. My only familiarity with fall and winter was a series of coloring books distributed at school, one for each month. The October one always included fall leaves, and either the December or January one would have pictures that included snow. I was always fascinated.

The changing of the leaves is one of the events that former U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall describes in "Eagle Pond," a collection of essays (and one longish poem) about New England in general and New Hampshire in particular. His mother's family came from New Hampshire and it's where Hall now lives, in a family farmhouse somewhat modernized but still close to what his ancestors knew.

The essays are divided into four sections: the Seasons at Eagle Pond, Here at Eagle Pond, Daylilies on the Hill and News from Eagle Pond. Hall takes the read on a long journey within a confined physical geography, and we're introduced to people, to an area's history, to farming as it was and is, and to the landscape. The landscape includes Eagle Pond, which is more of a lake than a pond.

As I read about the farm, the community and the state where he lives, I learned how important the sense of "place" is to him, and how it informs his poetry and writing. Place is as real to Hall's writing as Port William is to Wendell Berry and Yoknapatawpha County was to William Faulkner.

"When I was young," Hall writes, "I thought maybe the old didn't see, didn't relish the beauty they lived in. Then I learned: For more than a hundred years, anybody willing to leave this countryside has been rewarded for leaving it by more money, leisure and creature comforts. A few may have stayed from fecklessness or lack of gumption; more have stayed from family feeling or homesickness; but most stay from love. I live among a population, extraordinary in our culture, that lives where it lives because it loves its place. We are self-selected place-lovers. There's no reason to liver here except for love."

Hall says that it's likely only native New Englanders and Southerners who truly understand this notion of place. Perhaps that's a slight exaggeration, but I do know that when people ask me where I'm from, I always say "I was born and raised in New Orleans" even though I've lived far longer elsewhere than I did in New Orleans.

But that's what place does to you. That's what it does to Donald Hall.

Marvelous, humorous, laconic look at life in New Hampshire seasons by eminent New Englander, prizewinning poet and essayist Donald Hall.
If your family keeps everything, you will love this book. If you are from Vermont, you won't. But you must delight in Donald Hall.

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