Earlier this month, excerpted below, Hall recalls now-vanished New England scenes from his childhood at his grandparents' home, where he sits now.
| "… Each fall in New Hampshire, on the farm where my mother grew up, a girl in the country my grandfather and grandmother finished the autumn work, taking the last vegetables in from the cold fields, canning, storing roots and apples in the cellar under the kitchen. Then my grandfather raked leaves against the house as the final chore of autumn…" |
Hall writes poignantly of other losses too. He has written many poems about his wife, Jane Kenyon, also a poet, who died in 1995, at the age 47. "It's as if all the original poems of loss were a preparation for this great loss," he says.
Here is an excerpt from the poem
| "we lived in a small island stone nation without color under gray clouds and wind distant the unlimited ocean acute lymphoblastic leukemia without seagulls or palm trees without vegetation or animal life only barnacles and lead colored moss that darkened when months did …" |
As a poet, Hall knows well how the cycles of human and natural life intertwine. He says this connection may be especially clear in New England, where the seasons are so distinct. "And we fill ourselves with this constant change. The leaves come and the leaves go. They do it annually, they go through their productions and we follow them as we follow our own lives progressing from spring to summer to autumn to winter," he says, adding with a twinkle, "I am pretty wintry by this time myself!"
Hall's poetry contains a vein of optimism. Human life, he says, is a "perennial plant," always renewed in its season.
In one of Hall's most famous poems (which was adapted into a children's book that won the coveted Caldecott Medal in 1996), a farmer walks his ox and cart, heavy with produce, to market. He sells his wares, then his ox and cart, and returns home. Here is an excerpt:
| "… and at home by fire's light in November cold stitches new harness for next year's ox in the barn, and carves the yoke, and saws planks building the cart again." |
