Life Work

Distinguished poet Donald Hall reflects on the meaning of work solitude andlove The best new book I have read this year of extraordinary nobilityand wisdom. It ... » 

Distinguished poet Donald Hall reflects on the meaning of work solitude andlove The best new book I have read this year of extraordinary nobilityand wisdom. It will remain with me always. Louis Begley The New YorkTimes A sustained meditation on work as the key to personal happiness. . .. Life Work reads most of all like a firstperson psychological novel with apoet named Donald Hall as its protagonist. . . . Halls particular talentsultimately are for the memoir a genre in which he has few living equals. Inhis hands the memoir is only partially an autobiographical genre. He pours bothhis full critical intelligence and poetic sensibility into the form. Dana Gioia Los Angeles Times Hall . . . here offers a meditative look athis life as a writer in a spare and beautifully crafted memoir. Devoted to hisart Hall can barely wait for the sun to rise each morning so that he can beginthe task of shaping words.Publishers Weekly starred review I amdelighted and moved by Donald Halls Life Work his autobiographical tribute tosheer workas distinguished from laboras the most satisfying and ennoblingof activities whether one is writing canning vegetables or playing a dungfork on a New Hampshire farm.Paul Fussell The Boston Globe DonaldHall is the author of numerous prizewinning volumes of poetry including TheOne Day winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award essays childrensbooks and criticism. His new collection of short stories The Willow Templewill be published by Houghton Mifflin this spring. «