"Hall lived long enough to leave behind two final books, memento mori
titled Essays After Eighty (2014) and now A Carnival of Losses: Notes
Nearing Ninety. They're up there with the best things he did."
--Dwight Garner, New York Times
From the former poet laureate of the United States, essays from the
vantage point of very old age
Donald Hall lived a remarkable life of letters, one capped most recently
by the New York Times bestseller Essays After Eighty, a "treasure"
of a book in which he "balance[s] frankness about losses with humor
and gratitude" (Washington Post). Before his passing in 2018, nearing
ninety, Hall delivered this new collection of self-knowing, fierce, and
funny essays on aging, the pleasures of solitude, and the sometimes
astonishing freedoms arising from both. He intersperses memories of
exuberant days--as in Paris, 1951, with a French girl memorably inclined
to say, "I couldn't care less"--with writing, visceral and hilarious, on
what he has called the "unknown, unanticipated galaxy" of extreme old
age.
"Why should a nonagenarian hold anything back?" Hall answers his own
question by revealing several vivid instances of "the worst thing I ever
did," and through equally uncensored tales of literary friendships
spanning decades, with James Wright, Richard Wilbur, Seamus Heaney, and
other luminaries.
Cementing his place alongside Roger Angell and Joan Didion as a generous
and profound chronicler of loss, Hall returns to the death of his
beloved wife, Jane Kenyon, in an essay as original and searing as
anything he's written in his extraordinary literary lifetime.
