Purchase

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Powell's Books

Books-A-Million

Indie BookShop

Ripped Bodice

Add to Wish List

Also by Donald Hall:

Christmas At Eagle Pond, November 2012
Hardcover / e-Book
Unpacking the Boxes, September 2008
Hardcover
White Apples and the Taste of Stone, April 2006
Hardcover
The Best Day The Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon, May 2005
Hardcover
The Painted Bed, April 2002
Hardcover
Without, April 1999
Trade Size

The Painted Bed
Donald Hall

14th Collection of Poems

Houghton Mifflin
April 2002
On Sale: April 11, 2002
112 pages
ISBN: 0618187898
EAN: 9780618187898
Hardcover
Add to Wish List

Fiction Poetry

Donald Hall's fourteenth collection opens with an epigraph from the Urdu poet Faiz: "The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved." In that poetic tradition, as in THE PAINTED BED, the beloved might be a person or something else - life itself, or the disappearing countryside. Hall's new poems further the themes of love, death, and mourning so powerfully introduced in his WITHOUT (1998), but from the distance of passed time. A long poem, "Daylilies on the Hill 1975 - 1989," moves back to the happy repossession of the poet's old family house and its history - a structure that "persisted against assaults" as its generations of residents could not. These poems are by turns furious and resigned, spirited and despairing - "mania is melancholy reversed," as Hall writes in another long poem, "Kill the Day." In this book's fourth and final section, "Ardor," the poet moves toward acceptance of new life in old age; eros reemerges.

No awards found for this book.

Comments

No comments posted.

Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!