Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry [Hardcover]

This brisk and likable new memoir by the prolific and plainspoken former U.S. poet laureate Hall (White Apples and the Taste of Stone) covers the years before and after the period he and the late poet Jane Kenyon famously shared. After a childhood divided between his beloved rural New Hampshire and frustrating suburban Connecticut, he devoted himself in high school to poems, composing lines (Dead people don't like olives) at all hours. He felt out of place at a prestigious boarding school, but at home at 1940s Harvard, where he met Frank O'Hara, Edward Gorey, John Ashbery, and Robert Bly (who would become Hall's closest friend). Over a series of moves—back and forth between England and the U.S. (he considered Oxford University a party school), he finally left academia to live in New Hampshire with Jane Kenyon. He became a successful professional poet and a prolific freelance writer, meeting and working with George Plimpton and with the widow of the actor Charles Laughton, Eva La Gallienne. The memoir's last segment is by far its most affecting: the afflictions of grief and of old age—a stroke, trouble driving and walking, a scary manic episode—join up with the pleasure and ironies of late-life fame. (Sept.)
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"A warm-hearted exploration, from the perspective of old age, of how writing gave Hall's life its essential integrity." (Boston Globe )

"A plainspoken memoir revolving around landmarks of his literary life." (Washington Post )

"Hall's direct tone softens the extraordinariness of his life...When asked, at a Library of Congress dinner, the subject of his writing, he replies, 'Love, death, and New Hampshire.'" (New Yorker ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Donald Hall's remarkable life in poetry -- a career capped by his appointment as U.S. poet laureate in 2006 -- comes alive in this richly detailed, self-revealing memoir. Donald Hall's invaluable record of the making of a poet begins with his childhood in Depression-era suburban Connecticut, where he first realized poetry was "secret, dangerous, wicked, and delicious," and ends with what he calls "the planet of antiquity," punctuated by his appointment as poet laureate of the United States. Hall writes eloquently of the poetry and books that moved and formed him as a child and young man, and of adolescent efforts at poetry writing -- an endeavor he wryly describes as more hormonal than artistic. His painful, formative days at Exeter are followed by a poetic self-liberation of sorts at Harvard, where he met lifelong friends Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, and George Plimpton. Then he is off to Oxford, where the heady friendships and rampant poetry careerism of the postwar university scene are brilliantly captured. At eighty, Hall is as painstakingly honest about his failures and low points as a poet, writer, lover, and father as he is about his successes, making "Unpacking the Boxes" -- his first book since being named poet laureate -- both revelatory and tremendously poignant.

Donald Hall is the fourteenth poet laureate of the United States and the author of more than two dozen books of poems and prose, including White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946–2006. His work has garnered many honors, among them the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry for The One Day; the Lenore Marshall Award for The Happy Man; the Robert Frost Silver Medal from the Poetry Society of America for Old and New Poems; and the prestigious Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in recognition of his lifetime accomplishments. His poetry collection Without, which was written for Jane Kenyon during and after her illness, received the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Hall continues to inhabit the New Hampshire farmhouse where he and Jane Kenyon lived together.