A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety

by Donald Hall, Wendy Strothman

Overview

Former poet laureate of the United States Donald Hall’s final collection of essays, from the vantage point of very old age, once again “alternately lyrical and laugh-out-loud funny.”*
*(New York Times)

“Why should a nonagenarian hold anything back?” Donald Hall answers his own question in these self-knowing, fierce, and funny essays on aging, the pleasures of solitude, and the sometimes astonishing freedoms arising from both.
            Nearing ninety at the time of writing, he intersperses memories of exuberant days in his youth, with uncensored tales of literary friendships spanning decades—with James Wright, Richard Wilbur, Seamus Heaney, and other luminaries.
            Cementing his place alongside Roger Angell and Joan Didion as a generous and profound chronicler of loss, this final work is as original and searing as anything Hall wrote during his extraordinary literary lifetime.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781328826312
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	07/10/2018
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	9 MB

About the Author

DONALD HALL (1928-2018) served as poet laureate of the United States from 2006 to 2007. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a recipient of the National Medal of the Arts, awarded by the president.

Table of Contents

I Notes Nearing Ninety 1

II The Selected Poets of Donald Hall 79

III Necropoetics 125

IV A Carnival of Losses 147

Editorial Reviews

…up there with the best things [Hall] did…[A Carnival of Losses has] flat-footed gravitas, a vestigial sort of swat that calls to mind Johnny Cash's stark final records with the producer Rick Rubin…[It's] good enough to make clear that Hall did not live past his sell-by date as a writer.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

Hall lived long enough to leave behind two final books, memento mori titled ‘Essays After Eighty’ (2014) and now ‘A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety.’ They’re up there with the best things he did.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times “Donald Hall writes about love and loss and art and home in a manner so essential and direct it’s as if he’s put the full force of his life on the page. There are very few perfect books and A Carnival of Losses is one of them.”—Ann Patchett “A freewheeling essay collection that’s a fitting coda to a distinguished career . . . Hall may have reached his roundhouse but not before bequeathing readers with this moving valedictory gift.” —Washington Post “It's a beauty, brimming with stories, confessions and faded snapshots in time in which he muses about life, settles a few scores and brags a little about his accomplishments . . . It’s odd that a book whose subject is loss could be so uplifting. And yet it is. Hall may be telling us what it’s like to fall apart, but he does it so calmly, and with such wit and exactitude, that you can’t help but shake your head in wonder.” —Ann Levin, Associated Press “A joy to read.” —BookPage “It’s a heartbreaking beauty of a book.” —Bookish “Hall’s ruminative and detailed reflections on life make this a fantastic follow-up to his Essays After Eighty.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “A joyful, wistful celebration of poetry, poets, and a poet’s life . . . There’s much to enjoy in these exuberant 'notes.'” —Kirkus Reviews —

From the Publisher

2018-03-19
A joyful, wistful celebration of poetry, poets, and a poet's life.Personal matters that former poet laureate Hall wrote about in Essays After Eighty (2014, etc.) pop up again, this time with a greater sense of urgency: "As I write toward my nineties I shed my skin. I tell short anecdotes, I hazard an opinion, speculate, assume, and remember. Why should the nonagenarian hold anything back?" In the book's fourth section, "A Carnival of Losses," the author returns to stories about his New Hampshire life, relatives, friends, his appearances on Garrison Keillor's radio show (where once—off air—they traded dirty limericks, watching baseball, and interviewing Boris Karloff in high school. Also included here is his somber and poignant New Yorker piece, "Necropoetics," largely about his wife, poet and translator Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995. "Poetry begins with elegy," he writes, as he ruminates on the subject. Poetasters will enjoy his "The Selected Poets of Donald Hall" section, pithy, sharp, and gossipy profiles and anecdotes about poets he has known and met, some slight—e.g., "my recollections of some poets are brief. Allen Tate always looked grumpy." These are countered by those Hall loved, like Robert Creeley, Theodore Roethke, Seamus Heaney, and James Wright. Then there's James Dickey, the "best liar I ever knew," and Tom Clark, the "best student I ever had." Hall's admiring piece on Richard Wilbur includes a short, insightful passage on prosody in Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress." The book's first section, "Notes Nearing Ninety," shows off Hall's humor and wit, as in "The Vaper," about how vaping helped him quit smoking (mostly), "The Last Poem," about the only time he expressed his politics in a newspaper ("it went bacterial"), and a piece about frequently losing his teeth—literally.There's much to enjoy in these exuberant "notes."

Kirkus Reviews