Without: Poems

By Donald Hall

You might expect the fact of dying--the dying of a beloved wife and fellow poet--to make for a bleak and lonely tale. But Donald Hall's poignant and courageous poetry, facing that dread fact, involves us all: the magnificent, humorous, and gifted woman, Jane Kenyon, who suffered and died; the doctors and nurses who tried but failed to save her; the neighbors, friends, and relatives who grieved for her; the husband who sat by her while she lived and afterward sat in their house alone with his pain, self-pity, and fury; and those of us who till now had nothing to do with it. As Donald Hall writes, "Remembered happiness is agony; so is remembered agony." Without will touch every feeling reader, for everyone has suffered loss and requires the fellowship of elegy. In the earth's oldest poem, when Gilgamesh howls of the death of Enkidu, a grieving reader of our own time may feel a kinship, across the abyss of four thousand years, with a Sumerian king. In Without Donald Hall speaks to us all of grief, as a poet lamenting the death of a poet, as a husband mourning the loss of a wife. Without is Hall's greatest and most honorable achievement -- his give and testimony, his lament and his celebration of loss and of love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Apr 14, 1999
• ISBN: 9780547971148

Donald Hall

DONALD HALL (1928-2018) served as poet laureate of the United States from 2006 to 2007. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a recipient of the National Medal of the Arts, awarded by the president.

Book preview

Copyright © 1998 by Donald Hall

All rights reserved

First Mariner Books edition 1999

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Hall, Donald, 1928–

Without / Donald Hall,

p. cm.

ISBN 0-395-88408-x

ISBN 0-395-95765-6 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-0-395-95765-3

1. Elegiac poetry, American. 2. Hall, Donald, 1928– —Marriage—Poetry. 3. Kenyon, Jane—Poetry. 4. Death—Poetry. 5. Grief—Poetry. I. Title.

PS3515.A3152W58 1998

811'.54—dc21 97-39925 CIP

Author photograph © Linda Kunhardt

eISBN 9780547971148

v2.1018

A number of poems previously appeared, in earlier versions, in the following publications: American Poetry Review: Letter at Christmas. Boston Book Review: Her Long Illness. DoubleTake: Air Shatters in the Car’s Small Room. Georgia Review: Last Days. Gettysburg Review: Midsummer Letter. Harvard Review: Letter from Washington. Michigan Quarterly Review: Letter in the New Year. The New Criterion: The Gallery; Independence Day Letter; Postcard: January 22nd. The New York Times Magazine: Weeds and Peonies. The New Yorker: The Porcelain Couple; The Ship Pounding. Ontario Review: Letter after a Year. Ploughshares vol. 22/4: Letter with No Address. Poetry: A Beard for a Blue Pantry; Midwinter Letter; Without (also previously published in The Old Life, 1996). Sewanee Review: Blues for Polly; Song for Lucy. Threepenny Review: Letter in Autumn.

Page 9: Timor mortis conturbat me.

From William Dunbar’s Lament for the Makers:

The fear of death confounds me.

IN MEMORIAM

JANE KENYON

1947–1995

Her Long Illness

          Daybreak until nightfall,

he sat by his wife at the hospital

          while chemotherapy dripped

through the catheter into her heart.

          He drank coffee and read

the Globe. He paced; he worked

          on poems; he rubbed her back

and read aloud. Overcome with dread,

          they wept and affirmed

their love for each other, witlessly,

          over and over again.

When it snowed one morning Jane gazed

          at the darkness blurred

with flakes. They pushed the IV pump

          which she called Igor

slowly past the nurses’ pods, as far

          as the outside door

so that she could smell the snowy air.

A Beard for a Blue Pantry

In Alice Mattison’s dream

I have written a new poem I call

A Beard for a Blue Pantry.

My wife who is her dear friend

has leukemia. I sit by Jane’s bed

as white cells proliferate

and petechiae bloom on her skin.

The summer after we married

I grew a black beard, and Jane

wrote a poem on the airplane

flying home from California:

The First Eight Days of the Beard.

A dozen years later I shaved

when the beard turned as white

as King Arthur Flour

in the pantry where Bluebeard

the cat birdwatched out the window

from his perch on the breadbox.

In those deliberate days,

Jane made bread so honest

it once went blue in the pantry

overnight in a heat wave.

Each morning we worked together

apart, I in my downstairs study

and Jane at her rolltop desk

above the kitchen, making

Reviews for Without

[jphamilton-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I have been thinking about this book of painful poetry for months now. The collection is about Donald Hall's wife of many years, the poet Jane Kenyon, suffering from, and finally dying from cancer. The poems start during her illness, through her death, and continue on with Hall's agony as he is left without his other half and soul mate. The pain and loneliness reflect much my own life now. This poetry is extremely intense to read and reread, but it helps me know that I'm not the only one to go through losing someone so close too me, that not only is my heart just broken, it's missing many parts. I am incomplete without Vicky. Somewhere in the seemingly countless boxes of books I have in a storage unit, is a copy that I read many years ago. When a poet friend of mine mentioned this wonderful book during a conversation about Hall, I knew I couldn't wait any longer, I ordered the book. When I read it the first time, it tore me up with its intensity. This time it was much more personal and searingly brutal. I am off to find a quiet place under a tree where I can read and feel it all over again. In the back of my head, I can hear Vicky talking about what a masochist I am. It was something I never denied.

[unclebob53703 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Poems on the death of his wife; nearly unbearble

[teeps29 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

95 percent of my reading is science fiction, with a little history and popular science sprinkled in. My wife's the poet in the family. She handed me this book one day, I opened it to the first page, and I didn't stop reading until I had finished it. Very powerful. I suspect the closeness of our relationship had something to do with the book's impact on me, but who knows -- great writing is great writing. I had to get my own copy.

[katiekrug · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, both well-known poets, had a long and happy marriage despite a substantial age difference, his multiple bouts with cancer and her clinical depression. Then, she was diagnosed with leukemia, endured a long treatment and eventually died in 1995. These poems chronicle the time of her illness and the period after her death, and are incredibly moving. This book was published on the third anniversary of Kenyon’s death and lays bare Hall’s pain, both at what she endured and at her eventual death. It is a beautiful, 80-page volume of naked grief and lonely mourning.

[abirdman_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Hall's first book of poetry after the passing away of his wife, Jane Kenyon, and hence the title, "Without," is a brave, honest, intensely sad volume which finds a way through grief to a sort of peace.