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Donald Hall 5

Saving String, Kicking Leaves: Donald Hall’s Elegies

Hall’s elegiac poetry and prose teach grim lessons that are worth heeding, but there is also a sort of unsentimental, necessary hope—a hope for continuity and unexpected rebirth, a hope…
Steven Knepper
December 2, 2020

John Deere and the Ox-Cart Man

How might we recognize and adopt a vision for the future of agriculture inspired by the beauty and goodness of the ox-cart man?

Exile as Resettlement: A Review of The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon

Jane Kenyon was foremost a poet of place. Not of the State of New Hampshire, though she was its Poet Laureate, but of the much smaller and less abstract corner…

Dirt Thick with Known Dead

While wandering in a used bookstore this summer, I picked up Donald Hall’s String Too Short to be Saved. I enjoyed Hall’s stories about his grandparents’ farm (the book’s title…

Donald Hall and the Unsettling of American Letters

When Donald Hall passed away last week the obituary in his local New Hampshire newspaper made clear what an exceptional and instructive life he had lived, one stirring in its…