- Hardcover: 96 pages
- Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (Mar 10 1998)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 039588408X
- ISBN-13: 978-0395884089
- Product Dimensions: 22.6 x 15 x 1.5 cm
- Shipping Weight: 136 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,016,151 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Eagle Pond Farm, familiar even to casual readers of poet Donald Hall (author of 13 volumes of poetry spanning over 40 years), constitutes his spiritual and geographic center. He moved there permanently in 1975 after marrying the young and talented poet Jane Kenyon. His long relationship to Eagle Pond Farm and the creative haven the two poets created gives Without a special poignancy. It is where, in 1995, Jane Kenyon died.
The facts are hard but simple. In 1994, Jane Kenyon--who at 46 was beginning to enjoy the growing recognition of her work--was diagnosed with leukemia. Kenyon and Hall opted for the harrowing bone marrow transplant, to be performed in Seattle. It was not successful, and 12 weeks later, she was dead. Hall began drafting Without during the procedure and subsequent treatment, an act almost impossible to imagine--or perhaps for a poet, the only act possible in the face of what for most would be unspeakable. The magnitude of such suffering might indeed explain the collection's flatness of tone, as if grief can be touched only across great distances.
However restrained the pieces, Hall's gaze is fearless. Shifts in voice (he writes both in first and third person) create a tension that pulls the reader forward, as if compelled to consume this moving, raw account in one sitting. The quality of reader attention is more akin to what one gives a story. Narrative elements include a terse account of the bone-marrow transplant and Kenyan's subsequent radiation treatments ("It was as if she capped the Chernobyl pile with her body"), and it's here that the poems become almost unbearable to read.
Without captures the tedium of dying, jolted by surges of rage and "witless" love. Numbly, it lists the flinty details of Kenyon's last days, spent choosing the poems for her last volume, Otherwise: New & Selected Poems. It describes the moment of her dying in a way that makes one wonder if the ultimate experience of intimacy is to watch the beloved die, to be the one to close her eyes. "Back home from the grave," Hall writes toward the end of this volume, "behind my desk I made / a gallery of Janes," but it can be said that every poem presents a facet of his wife while dying, accruing finally to a gallery of love and grief.
There are some distinguishing jolts to our familiar concepts about death as in, for example, the poem showing the couple, with their minister, praying and holding hands. And when they prayed, "grace was evident / but not the comfort of mercy or reprieve / The embodied figure / on the cross still twisted under the sun." By and large, however, it's a volume not remarkable for bold imagery or shocking connections; rather for the expression of raw grief that follows, unwelcome, all of our necessary losses. --Hollis Giammatteo
From Booklist
Three years ago, as cancer destroyed his wife, Jane Kenyon, Hall helped her assemble her last book, Otherwise (1996), which stands with Langston Hughes' great Selected Poems (1959) as a classic of poetic self-presentation. Now he adds to her masterpiece a hard pendant of his own, a collection concerned with her last days, her dying, and his grief. These poems are less brilliant by far than the virtually saltating verse in The Museum of Clear Ideas (1993) and The Old Life (1996). They are near-cruelly blunt about Kenyon's physical deterioration and Hall's own indecorous, raging sadness; for instance, when he recalls an abashing incident while alone for the first time at Christmas--" sick with longing, / I press my penis / into zinc and butcherblock." Many who have lost a mate will recognize this amalgam of lust and despair. They will also feel again that weird weightlessness of the heart when, in the same poem, Hall reports, in a non sequitur, "Yesterday I caught sight of you / in the Kearsarge Mini-Mart." Ray Olson
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Heartful and Heartfelt,
By
This review is from: Without: Poems (Paperback)
In his book of poems "Without", Donald Hall weaves a lexicographic tribute to his late wife, and fellow poet, Jane Kenyon, and in turn, leaves the world a legacy of grief and honor.I first heard of this book by listening to NPR's "This American Life" on a featured story about the couple. Donald himself read some of these poems, and I knew within a minute, I had to have this work. As poets so meekly and admirably do, Donald Hall captures the moments of his wife's last days through her battle with leukemia. The poems are simple, attainable, and direct. He minces no words as he describes Jane's downfall. He poetry is both pure and chilling; you feel her loss, you feel her impact, you feel. If you are considering purchasing this book, I may recommend you purchasing Jane Kenyon's final book of poetry called "Otherwise". In a sense, they are companion pieces to each other, and in reading both you hear her voice, along with his, to make it theirs. I highly recommend this book if you have ever lost someone, or want to understand the not understandable impact of losing someone.
1.0 out of 5 stars
Shameless!,
By MarkAndrews "twincitiesreader" (Minneapolis, MN United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Without: Poems (Hardcover)
Hall once wrote an essay in which he rightly criticized Robert Lowell's late poetry. Hall said that once Lowell got famous, he seemed to feel that he could just write down details from his own life in bland verse and people would praise it. The poetry seemed written with the attitude--"It happened to me, THE Robert Lowell, so it must be important." So one wonders if Hall has forgotten writing the essay, for he is doing the same thing here. The poems are almost unbelievably bland, line breaks are meaningless, and one feels not sympathy for Hall in his grief but rather that his wife's dying and death is being exploited. It's a sad sight to witness.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tactful, Subtle, Brilliant,
By
This review is from: Without: Poems (Hardcover)
Without constitutes my first experience with Donald Hall's poetry, need I say it was not my last? This collection reads like a novel, it is really a fluid sequence of accounts of his wife's death, either in devastatingly ironic and witty snapshots or extended odes and elegies such as the harrowing "Letter With No Address," written to his dead wife, nearly all of which will grab you by the throat and suck you into the spaces in between the words. Hall knew that if he was going to try and rip a vein of life from his soul and convey its contents to his readers, he could only do so by immersing them within the poems themselves. Few poets ever develop the kind of authenticity of voice required to achieve such a feat. It is surely a standard to which any poet aspires.Donald Hall approached this project perfectly. This is not a collection that stammers with captivating imagery or the kind of unfathomable metaphorical connections that are found in the work of our best American poets such as Hart Crane or Walt Whitman. Hall knew that in devoting a collection of poems to such a personal and painful experience, one that obviously left its fang marks on his heart, he risked committing some of the cardinal sins of poetry, such as mawkishness and self-pity. Hall avoids those pitfalls at every conceivable instance. His ability to blend sentimentality with dry irony and compelling wit, compounded by his successful effort to keep himself out of the poems despite his inevitable relation to them, make this the finest collection of his career, and indeed the work of a man who just may be ranked among our very top American poets somewhere down the line. Without stands among the most riveting documents of love, desire and loss to be found throughout the history of American Poetry.
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