The Bone Ring

by Donald Hall

Book by Hall, Donald

54 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1987

About the author

Donald Hall was considered one of the major American poets of his generation.

His poetry explores the longing for a more bucolic past and reflects the poet’s abiding reverence for nature. Although Hall gained early success with his first collection, Exiles and Marriages (1955), his later poetry is generally regarded as the best of his career. Often compared favorably with such writers as James Dickey, Robert Bly, and James Wright, Hall used simple, direct language to evoke surrealistic imagery. In addition to his poetry, Hall built a respected body of prose that includes essays, short fiction, plays, and children’s books. Hall, who lived on the New Hampshire farm he visited in summers as a boy, was also noted for the anthologies he has edited and is a popular teacher, speaker, and reader of his own poems.

Born in 1928, Hall grew up in Hamden, Connecticut. The Hall household was marked by a volatile father and a mother who was “steadier, maybe with more access to depths because there was less continual surface,” as Hall explained in an essay for Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series (CAAS). “To her I owe my fires, to my father my tears. I owe them both for their reading.” By age twelve, Hall had discovered the poet and short story writer Edgar Allan Poe: “I read Poe and my life changed,” he remarked in CAAS. Another strong influence in Hall’s early years was his maternal great-grandfather’s farm in New Hampshire, where he spent many summers. Decades later, he bought the same farm and settled there as a full-time writer and poet.

Hall attended Philips Exeter Academy and had his first poem published at age 16. He was a participant at the prestigious Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, where he met Robert Frost, that same year. From Exeter, Hall went to Harvard University, attending class alongside Adrienne Rich, Robert Bly, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery; he also studied for a year with Archibald MacLeish. Hall earned a BLitt from Oxford University and won the Newdigate contest for his poem “Exile,” one of the few Americans ever to win the prize. Returning to the United States, Hall spent a year at Stanford, studying under the poet-critic Yvor Winters, before returning to Harvard to join the prestigious Society of Fellows. It was there that Hall assembled Exiles and Marriages, a tightly-structured collection crafted in rigid rhyme and meter. In 1953, Hall also became the poetry editor of the Paris Review, a position he held until 1961. In 1957 he took a position as assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan, where he remained until 1975. While at Michigan, Hall met the young Jane Kenyon. They later married and, when Hall’s grandmother, who owned Eagle Pond Farm, passed away, bought the farm, left teaching, and moved there together. The collections Kicking the Leaves (1978) and The Happy Man (1986) reflect Hall’s happiness at his return to the family farm, a place rich with memories and links to his past. Many of the poems explore and celebrate the continuity between generations. The Happy Man won the Lenore Marshall/Nation Prize. Hall’s next book, The One Day (1988), won the National Book Critics Circle Award. A long poem that meditates on the on-set of old age, The One Day, like much of Hall’s early work, takes shape under formal pressure: composed of 110 stanzas, split over three sections, its final sections are written in blank verse. The critic Frederick Pollack praised the book as possibly “the last masterpiece of American Modernism. Any poet who seeks to surpass this genre should study it; any reader who has lost interest in contemporary poetry should read it.” Old and New Poems (1990) contains several traditional poems from earlier collections, as well as more innovative verses not previously published. “Baseball,” included in The Museum of Clear Ideas (1993), is the poet’s ode to the great American pastime and is structured around t

Reviews

[Cynthia Egbert · Rating 3 out of 5]

This felt a great deal like a male, poetry driven, version of Thorton Wilder's Our Town with its minimal set and cast and the idea of reminiscing over a lifetime. I enjoyed it and there were a few lines that were real gems. My favorite being the poem, which I won't put down here in its entirety, where an old man approaches the plate after the catcher breaks his thumb and there are not enough players and hits one out of the park "so it's supposed it still floats on today". And the last stanza reads...

"What is your name?" the captain asked. "Tell us your name," cried all.
As down his cheeks enormous tears were seen to run and fall.
For one brief moment he was still, then murmured soft and low:
"I'm might Casey who struck out just twenty years ago."

"He liked to keep things.
So do you. My mother told me
she found a box of pieces
of tiny string up here
with writing on it that said
'string too short to be saved.'"

"But sheep are stupid. Pigs
are ten times smarter than sheep."

"War kills spirits, they kill
a whole country's spirit.
That's why our people left
England behind, and the rotten
harvest of empire. Then
it required a war to finish
the leaving behind. Maybe
the Revolution was a war
FOR spirits...Maybe."

"Oh, we couldn't make it
work. But having a look
at a broken locomotive
works to connect us up
with everything gone before us."

[Mills College Library]

812.54 H1753b 1987