Life Work

Distinguished poet Donald Hall reflects on the meaning of work, solitude, and love "The best new book I have read this year, of extraordinary nobility and wisdom. It will remain with me always."—Louis Begley, The New York Times "A sustained meditation on work as the key to personal happiness. . . . Life Work reads most of all like a first-person psychological novel with a poet named Donald Hall as its protagonist. . . . Hall's particular talents ultimately [are] for the memoir, a genre in which he has few living equals. In his hands the memoir is only partially an autobiographical genre. He pours both his full critical intelligence and poetic sensibility into the form."—Dana Gioia, Los Angeles Times "Hall . . . here offers a meditative look at his life as a writer in a spare and beautifully crafted memoir. Devoted to his art, Hall can barely wait for the sun to rise each morning so that he can begin the task of shaping words."—Publishers Weekly (starred review) "I [am] delighted and moved by Donald Hall's Life Work, his autobiographical tribute to sheer work--as distinguished from labor--as the most satisfying and ennobling of activities, whether one is writing, canning vegetables or playing a dung fork on a New Hampshire farm."—Paul Fussell, The Boston Globe “Donald Hall’s Life Work has been strangely gripping, what with his daily to do lists, his ruminations on the sublimating power of work. Hall has written so much about that house in New Hampshire where he lives that I’m beginning to think of it less as a place than a state of mind. I find it odd that a creative mind can work with such Spartan organization (he describes waiting for the alarm to go off at 4:45 AM, so eager is he to get to his desk) at such a mysterious activity (making a poem work) without getting in the way of itself.”—John Freeman’s blog (National Book Critics Circle Board President)

Distinguished poet Donald Hall reflects on the meaning of work, solitude, and love

“The best new book I have read this year, of extraordinary nobility and wisdom. It will remain with me always.” —Louis Begley, The New York Times

“A sustained meditation on work as the key to personal happiness. . . . Life Work reads most of all like a first-person psychological novel with a poet named Donald Hall as its protagonist. . . . Hall’s particular talents ultimately [are] for the memoir, a genre in which he has few living equals. In his hands the memoir is only partially an autobiographical genre. He pours both his full critical intelligence and poetic sensibility into the form.” —Dana Gioia, Los Angeles Times

“Hall . . . here offers a meditative look at his life as a writer in a spare and beautifully crafted memoir. Devoted to his art, Hall can barely wait for the sun to rise each morning so that he can begin the task of shaping words.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“I [am] delighted and moved by Donald Hall’s Life Work, his autobiographical tribute to sheer work—as distinguished from labor—as the most satisfying and ennobling of activities, whether one is writing, canning vegetables or playing a dung fork on a New Hampshire farm.” —Paul Fussell, The Boston Globe

Donald Hall is the author of numerous prizewinning volumes of poetry, including The One Day, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, essays, children’s books, and criticism. His new collection of short stories, The Willow Temple, will be published by Houghton Mifflin thisspring.

Publishers Weekly

Hall, winner of the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award for his poetry ( The One Day ), and the author of children's books ( The Ox-Cart Man ), memoirs and a collection of biographies of poets ( Their Ancient Glittering Eyes ), here offers a meditative look at his life as a writer in a spare and beautifully crafted memoir. Devoted to his art, Hall can barely wait for the sun to rise each morning so that he can begin the task of shaping words. His discovery that a supposedly arrested cancer has now metastasized to his liver drives him to write with even greater urgency and to reflect on the gift of ``absorbedness'' in work that was given to him in his boyhood by his farmer grandfather. Complementing his passion for writing is the love he and his wife feel for each other; a love which enables him to face a liver operation--undergone during the writing of this book--and the possibility of imminent death with courage and hope. 25,000 first printing; major ad/promo; first serial to the New York Times Sunday Magazine; author tour. (Sept.)

The revered American Poet Laureate reflects on the meaning of work, solitude, and love with “extraordinary nobility and wisdom” ( The New York Times ) When Donald Hall moved to his grandparents’ New Hampshire farm in 1975, his work as a writer and a life devoted to the literary arts must have seemed remote from the harsh physical labor of his ancestors. However, he reveals a similar kind of artistry in the lives of his grandparents, Kate and Wesley. From them, he learned that the devotion to craft—be it canning vegetables, writing poems, or carting manure—creates its own special discipline and an ‘absorbedness’ that no wage can compensate. In this “sustained meditation on work as the key to personal happiness” ( Los Angeles Time s), we see how the writer has modeled his own life on his family’s lives of work, solitude, and love. When Hall comes face to face with his own mortality halfway through writing this book, we understand both his obsession with work and its ultimate consolation. "Trust a poet to write a memoir that is not a memoir but a series of reflections organized around a theme—in this case, the pleasures of work. Hall, a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award..., opens by making a distinction between jobs, chores, and work. He then explains himself by detailing the dedicated lives of his sturdy New England ancestors, his decision to leave the security of teaching for full-time writing, and his struggle with recurrent cancer—most annoying because it keeps him from the 'absorbedness' that working on a poem allows. Along the way, we learn something of the poet's creative processes, which are nourished by a disciplined and almost overfull work schedule. Hall writes cleanly, crisply, and with a gentle conviction that will push readers out of their easy chairs and set them to working, too. He inspires such absorbedness that the task of reading is done in an instant. Highly recommended." - Barbara Hoffert, *Library Journal*