Without : Poems

Rating:
Summary: Love, Poetry, and Healing
Review: Donald Hall has taken his greatest pain and laid it out in verse so touching, so unsentimental, and so clear, that the reader shares. And cries. This book is a powerful testament to love and to poetry, and ultimately has a healing effect on the poet and the reader. Exquisite.

Rating:
Summary: Shameless!
Review: Hall once wrote an essay in which he rightly criticized Robert Lowell's late poetry. Hall said that once Lowell got famous, he seemed to feel that he could just write down details from his own life in bland verse and people would praise it. The poetry seemed written with the attitude--"It happened to me, THE Robert Lowell, so it must be important." So one wonders if Hall has forgotten writing the essay, for he is doing the same thing here. The poems are almost unbelievably bland, line breaks are meaningless, and one feels not sympathy for Hall in his grief but rather that his wife's dying and death is being exploited. It's a sad sight to witness.

Rating:
Summary: Shameless!
Review: Hall once wrote an essay in which he rightly criticized Robert Lowell's late poetry. Hall said that once Lowell got famous, he seemed to feel that he could just write down details from his own life in bland verse and people would praise it. The poetry seemed written with the attitude--"It happened to me, THE Robert Lowell, so it must be important." So one wonders if Hall has forgotten writing the essay, for he is doing the same thing here. The poems are almost unbelievably bland, line breaks are meaningless, and one feels not sympathy for Hall in his grief but rather that his wife's dying and death is being exploited. It's a sad sight to witness.

Rating:
Summary: Goodbye, Jane...
Review: I discovered Jane Kenyon when her poem "Otherwise" and her beautiful presence aired on Bill Moyers' "The Language of Life". It was the year I found I could no longer tolerate my depression and set about creating a new life that I learned of her depression. I learned that she had been born one year earlier, and in her poetry I found us kindred spirits. Then I found she was dying of leukemia, and indeed died that next year after the research center across the street had once again made promises it could not keep. My best friend's husband had heard the same promises and suffered the same fate. Last week Seattle's beloved school superintendent had those same promises fail him. When I heard Donald Hall had written poems on her death, I had a mixed reaction. I did not want her death minimized or exploited. Yet, I wanted her remembered, her courage and victory over herself. So it was some months later when I picked up "Without" and began reading of the journey Donald and Jane made together, a journey not unfamiliar to those who have taken the path before them. I felt their pain, their love, and their courage. It was difficult reading, I felt as though I knew her personally, and I grieved her more than others. But he wrote with grace, love and truth. Jane is there in the poems, and in all the works she leaves beind. If only we had had her for a little longer.

Rating:
Summary: the eye of suffering...
Review: I remember first reading this book last summer. I usually read books of poetry not front to back, but here and there, allowing each poem to conjure up its own world apart from order in relation to other poetry. But with this book - I began at the beginning and followed through. Reading "The Snow Leopard" by Peter Matthiessen right now has reminded me of "Without" - this stunning collection from Hall sits alongside particular passages from the Matthiessen - they are the only literature I've ever experienced to immerse me so thoroughly in suffering and heartbreak as to be incapable of anything other than a paralysis of weeping...

Rating:
Summary: Heartful and Heartfelt
Review: In his book of poems "Without", Donald Hall weaves a lexicographic tribute to his late wife, and fellow poet, Jane Kenyon, and in turn, leaves the world a legacy of grief and honor.

I first heard of this book by listening to NPR's "This American Life" on a featured story about the couple. Donald himself read some of these poems, and I knew within a minute, I had to have this work.

As poets so meekly and admirably do, Donald Hall captures the moments of his wife's last days through her battle with leukemia. The poems are simple, attainable, and direct. He minces no words as he describes Jane's downfall. He poetry is both pure and chilling; you feel her loss, you feel her impact, you feel.

If you are considering purchasing this book, I may recommend you purchasing Jane Kenyon's final book of poetry called "Otherwise". In a sense, they are companion pieces to each other, and in reading both you hear her voice, along with his, to make it theirs.

I highly recommend this book if you have ever lost someone, or want to understand the not understandable impact of losing someone.

Rating:
Summary: Heartful and Heartfelt
Review: In his book of poems "Without", Donald Hall weaves a lexicographic tribute to his late wife, and fellow poet, Jane Kenyon, and in turn, leaves the world a legacy of grief and honor.

I first heard of this book by listening to NPR's "This American Life" on a featured story about the couple. Donald himself read some of these poems, and I knew within a minute, I had to have this work.

As poets so meekly and admirably do, Donald Hall captures the moments of his wife's last days through her battle with leukemia. The poems are simple, attainable, and direct. He minces no words as he describes Jane's downfall. He poetry is both pure and chilling; you feel her loss, you feel her impact, you feel.

If you are considering purchasing this book, I may recommend you purchasing Jane Kenyon's final book of poetry called "Otherwise". In a sense, they are companion pieces to each other, and in reading both you hear her voice, along with his, to make it theirs.

I highly recommend this book if you have ever lost someone, or want to understand the not understandable impact of losing someone.

Rating:
Summary: Devastatingly beautiful
Review: Only this evening I finished reading "Without." I remain stunned by not only the quality of the poetry, but by the utter honesty of Donald Hall in his documentation of his wife's illness and death.

No one other than Galway Kinnell has, for me, expressed with such simple clarity through their poetry the sometimes unbearable anguish of simply being human. Anyone who has ever suffered the loss of another, whether through death or distance, will grieve with Hall and appreciate the pain that this art required.

This book will remain with me for many years, as I know it will be one to which I will be compelled to return. Read it, and appreciate every day you are given.

Rating:
Summary: Inspiring
Review: This is one of my favorite collections of poetry. Hall's elegies are both raw and elegant--never falling into melodrama. For its clear descriptions of loss, it is difficult to dislike WITHOUT, in fact it should be an aching in the hearts of those who discover it.

Rating:
Summary: Tactful, Subtle, Brilliant
Review: Without constitutes my first experience with Donald Hall's poetry, need I say it was not my last? This collection reads like a novel, it is really a fluid sequence of accounts of his wife's death, either in devastatingly ironic and witty snapshots or extended odes and elegies such as the harrowing "Letter With No Address," written to his dead wife, nearly all of which will grab you by the throat and suck you into the spaces in between the words. Hall knew that if he was going to try and rip a vein of life from his soul and convey its contents to his readers, he could only do so by immersing them within the poems themselves. Few poets ever develop the kind of authenticity of voice required to achieve such a feat. It is surely a standard to which any poet aspires.

Donald Hall approached this project perfectly. This is not a collection that stammers with captivating imagery or the kind of unfathomable metaphorical connections that are found in the work of our best American poets such as Hart Crane or Walt Whitman. Hall knew that in devoting a collection of poems to such a personal and painful experience, one that obviously left its fang marks on his heart, he risked committing some of the cardinal sins of poetry, such as mawkishness and self-pity.

Hall avoids those pitfalls at every conceivable instance. His ability to blend sentimentality with dry irony and compelling wit, compounded by his successful effort to keep himself out of the poems despite his inevitable relation to them, make this the finest collection of his career, and indeed the work of a man who just may be ranked among our very top American poets somewhere down the line. Without stands among the most riveting documents of love, desire and loss to be found throughout the history of American Poetry.