Donald Hall – Work, Love, Build a House and Die – (1928-2018)
(Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon)
The joy and tragedy of his life were his years with Kenyon, his second wife. They met in 1969, when she was his student at the University of Michigan. By the mid-’70s, they were married and living together at Eagle Creek, fellow poets enjoying a fantasy of mind and body — of sex, work and homemaking.
“We sleep, we make love, we plant a tree, we walk up and down/eating lunch,” he wrote.
Donald Hall, Who Gave His Life to Work and Eros.
He was also very funny and very particular (“I love chicken salad, egg salad as long as it has onion, turkey and salami. I don’t like tuna”). The horrors of antiquity—a “black fatigue,” congestive heart failure, “a hundred and fifty colonoscopies,” walking more slowly with his “rollator,” falling down, the loss of words—did not exclude joy and love.
New Yorker -Between Solitude and Loneliness (Hall’s short Story)
“Work, love, build a house, and die,” he wrote. “But build a house.” – Donald Hall
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.