Poet kept to his country ways

Versatile writer published more than 50 books over his career

NEW YORK Donald Hall, a prolific, award-winning U.S. poet and man of letters widely admired for his sharp humour and painful candour about nature, mortality, baseball and the distant past, has died at age 89.

Hall’s daughter, Philippa Smith, confirmed that her father died June 23 at his home in Wilmot, N.H., after being in hospice care for some time.

“He’s really quite amazingly versatile,” said Hall’s longtime friend Mike Pride, the editor emeritus of the Concord Monitor newspaper and a retired administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes. He said Hall would occasionally speak to reporters at the Monitor about the importance of words.

Hall was the 2006-2007 U.S. poet laureate.

Starting in the 1950s, Hall published more than 50 books, from poetry and drama to biography and memoirs, and edited a pair of influential anthologies. He was an avid baseball fan who wrote odes to his beloved Boston Red Sox, completed a book on pitcher Dock Ellis and contributed to Sports Illustrated. He wrote a prize-winning children’s book, Ox-cart Man, and even attempted a biography of Charles Laughton, only to have the actor’s widow, Elsa Lanchester, kill the project.

But the greatest acclaim came for his poetry, for which his honours included a U.S. National Book Critics Circle prize, membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a National Medal of Arts.

In person, he at times resembled a 19th-century rustic with his untrimmed beard and ragged hair. And his work reached back to timeless images of his beloved, ancestral New Hampshire home, Eagle Pond Farm, built in 1803 and belonging to his family since the 1860s. Hall was born in New Haven, Conn., on Sept. 20, 1928, but soon favoured Eagle Pond to the “blocks of six-room houses” back home.

For Hall, the industrialized, commercialized world often seemed an intrusion, like a neon sign along a dirt road. In the tradition of T.S. Eliot and other modernists, he juxtaposed classical and historical references with contemporary slang and brand names.

An opponent of the Vietnam War whose taxes were audited year after year, he was also ruthlessly selfcritical.

Nakedly, even abjectly, he recorded his failures and shortcomings and disappointments, whether his infidelities or his struggles with alcoholism.

He formed many lasting literary friendships at Harvard University, including with fellow poets Robert Bly and Adrienne Rich and with George Plimpton, for whom he later served as the first poetry editor at The Paris Review.