Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry

by Donald Hall

Book Overview

Donald Hall's remarkable life in poetry -- a career capped by his appointment as U.S. poet laureate in 2006 -- comes alive in this richly detailed, self-revealing memoir.

Hall's invaluable record of the making of a poet begins with his childhood in Depression-era suburban Connecticut, where he first realized poetry was "secret, dangerous, wicked, and delicious," and ends with what he calls "the planet of antiquity," a time of life dramatically...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 054724794X
• ISBN13: 9780547247946
• Release Date: September 2009
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.48 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.2" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

This is a How To Book - a truly inspiring story

I agree with the other reviewers here however I found a slightly different, entirely practical perspective in this book that hasn't been mentioned. Mr. Hall says that he decided to write while still a child and methodically set aside time every day to practice and perfect the craft, decades ahead of widely published research showing that mastery requires habits along these lines. He subsequently developed a disciplined process for finding inspiration, working through countless revisions and assembling collections. He shares details of building a successful freelance writing career and networking that could be a blueprint for any entrepreneur in any field. Mr. Hall's story could transition to the management books section quite easily! I have one editorial quibble about the politics. There are reasonable arguments to be made on all sides of current issues. A clear distinction should be made between people and their views - reasonable people should be able to disagree and retain mutual respect, and reasonably skilled writers ought to articulate their points accordingly.Broad rants to the effect that 'democrats are socialists' or 'republicans are evil moneymongers' are appropriate for a devoted fan defending a favorite sports team, not for a citizen that hopes to engage in rational discourse about the issues of our times. I was very disappointed that several pages of this book were a repeat of the type of childish sniping that we can easily see on Comedy Central, or any playground for that matter, as Mr. Hall is surely capable of articulating a rational argument to support his political views. It was a dreary detour in an otherwise extremely moving and motivating story. One other technological note - this is the first book that I read on my new Kindle and I was extremely pleased. It was easy on the eyes and easy to use.

Donald Hall's beautiful memoir is food for literary enthusiasts

Donald Hall was the poet laureate in the US for 2006-2007. I saw this book in the New York Times Book Review section in November and ordered it immediately from my library. Sadly, I have to return this book to the library, having renewed it and renewed it and renewed it... I read this book at night. In a few weeks, I will buy it so I can have a copy for myself. Though it is prose, it is more like poetry than what most consider to be 'prose'. Not surprising. A few excerpts that tell of Mr. Hall's remarkable and unremarkable life, as only a poet can write: *** The book opens: BEGIN EXCERPT: 'At fourteen I decided to spend my life writing poetry, which is what I have done. My parents supported my desire, or at least did not attempt to dissuade me. My father hated his work, and it was his passion that I should do what I wanted to do. My mother was prevented by her gender and her era (born 1903) from exercising her intense aimless ambition, which settled on me. They worried how I would make a living at poetry, but would not pressure me to join the prosperous family business, the Brock-Hall Dairy in Connecticut, where my father added columns of figures from Monday into Saturday. Their support was affectionate, passive and generous. Beginning when I was a freshman in high school, they gave me for Christmas and birthdays the many books of poetry I listed for them. Why did I come to poetry at such an age? A few years ago in Nebraska, talking about my beginnings to high school students, I told about wanting to write because I loved Poe and Keats, later Eliot and Yeats. A skeptical boy asked, "Didn't you do it to pick up chicks?" "Yes!" I answered. "How could I forget?" In the absence of athletic skill, I found that poetry attracted at least the arty girls if not the cheerleaders. Ambition exists to provide avenue for the libido. This notion begets another, less flattering to the peacock male ego. Maybe all women are the one woman, and everything gets done to woo Mom.' END EXCERPT Sigh. I read on. I was in Montreal, reading in bed, with fewer distractions than I had at home. I could not stop reading. Hall describes the meaning of the title of his book "Unpacking the boxes". His mother died in 1994, at age 90, while his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, was ill. He emptied his mother's house, and a moving van took seventy or eighty boxes to his house, and also to a cottage the family owned nearby. Hall's wife died a few years later. For some time, Hall did not open the boxes. Three years after his wife died, his assistant moved into the cottage (not where he lived but another house) and helped him unpack the boxes. Many books in the boxes would go to the University of New Hampshire. He describes the contents, which included various photos of his parents while young, photos of of cats dead for fifty years, model airplanes, toy cars, a Boy Scout manual, a baseball and baseball glove with its "oiled pocket chewed by mice". Hall states, that in

If you love literature, read this book

Don Hall has been a poet for nearly 70 years, after making a conscious decision to write poetry in early adolescence. This book reveals the inner life of a modest man who has labored at his craft through good and bad times. I admire him tremendously, both as a writer and a man. I have to confess I have not read his poetry; indeed that I don't normally read poetry at all. I'm mostly a memoir person these days. But I purchased, along with this memoir, BOXES, the newest collection of Hall's poems from 1946 to 2006, called WHITE APPLES AND THE TASTE OF STONE, and am now beginning to make my way through it. Maybe Hall will finally convert me to poetry. This is the third of Hall's memoirs I have read, having found and enjoyed STRING TOO SHORT TO BE SAVED more than a dozen years ago. And I recently read THE BEST DAY THE WORST DAY, about his life with poet Jane Kenyon, a beautiful, if heartbreaking, book. In this newest memoir Hall is not simply honest; he opens his soul to us as he speaks of his life, early and late, including his youth, unhappy prep school days, his Oxford, Michigan and New Hampshire years. And always it has been a life filled with books and other people who love books and poetry, both practitioners and readers. It was like a who's who of modern letters from the past fifty-some years. But Hall's openness also makes it a bit like watching someone open a vein - painful and heartbreaking, particularly when he speaks of the loss of Kenyon and his life since then. Here's a passage from near the end of the book I found particularly compelling, initially funny but ultimately, profoundly sad - "When you are three years old and your socks are falling down, somebody says, 'Pull up your socks, Donnie.' Then you are twelve, solitary, reading books all day, then twenty-five and a new father, burping your son at two A.M. When you turn forty, divorced, your life is a passage among disasters. Then you marry again, you are happy, you turn sixty, your wife dies. Then you are eighty and your socks fall down again. No one tells you to pull them up." The multifold indignities of illness and aging are touchingly told here, but through it all, Hall somehow manages to maintain his childlike sense of wonder, his intellectual curiosity, and his marvelous sense of humor. This is, finally, a wonderful story of a life well lived and examined minutely. I relished its art and its beauty. - Tim Bazzett, author of the REED CITY BOY trilogy and LOVE, WAR & POLIO

Hall returns to his childhood

When former U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall lost his mother in 1994, he packed up everything from her house and moved the boxes, unopened, to his own cottage. His wife, Jane Kenyon, died the following year; and Hall mourned his closest losses at length. Only the passage of time gave him the impetus to finally go back and "unpack the boxes." What he uncovered were the memories of his childhood and the stories of his parents' lives, jogged into the present by tokens, mementos, scraps, and photographs. He shares those remembered scenes with us on these pages. This memoir, then, covers his early years in New Haven, Connecticut; his schooling at Exeter in New Hampshire; his undergraduate study at Harvard; and additional education in Europe. Always in the background is the lure of his grandparents' farm in New Hampshire, a sanctuary and a retreat from those other "civilized" experiences. We shouldn't be surprised that he eventually chooses to live there, later in life. Since Hall documented Jane's life and death in the book "The Best Day the Worst Day," he skips over most of those details here. He does delve into his resulting despondency. And then he gets the call in 2006 -- a fax, really -- that he's been named the Poet Laureate. He's excited, he accepts, and that's the end of this volume. I saw Donald Hall in person at the live broadcast of "A Prairie Home Companion" at Tanglewood in June 2008. I knew little of him before that night, I'm afraid to say. But after finishing this book, I can't wait to read more. Now I'll have to catch up by going back to all of his previous books.

A moving memoir

I first discovered Donald Hall when teaching high school English. Hundreds of my students, through the years, read his classic "My Son My Executioner" in my class, and since first discovering that poem at an AP conference, I've read everything I can find that he's written. This memoir is a gentle, moving, ultimately rather heartbreaking book. I recommend it.