Donald Hall, who died on June 23 at 89, was not a particularly nimble poet. Toward the end of his life, with his bushy beard and high forehead and rumpled sense of rectitude, Hall resembled Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as drawn by Edward Koren. Hall, who was poet laureate from 2006 to 2007, was stupefyingly productive. One got the impression that, after a long day at his desk, he walked outside and urinated a few final poems into the snow banks around his New Hampshire farm. These books have flat-footed gravitas, a vestigial sort of swat that calls to mind Johnny Cash’s stark final records with the producer Rick Rubin.

Source: New York Times July 30, 2018 18:45 UTC