The Back Chamber

June 20, 2011
The former U.S. poet laureate reaches his 20th book in unmistakably honest form, aggressively plain and unfailingly open about sex, old age, suicide, recovery, the friendship of poets, the business of poetry, dogs, New Hampshire, and baseball. Some of Hall's best-known books mourn his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, whose absence grieves him here again. More prominent, though, are the poems about sexâsome erotic, some comic, all frank, and intent on the ironies that attend lust in old age. A long and underwhelming narrative poem, "Ric's Progress," occupies the middle of the volume; Hall follows the courtship, marriage, and adulteries of a predictable, slightly Updikeish everyman, leavening his errant ways with grim wisdomâ"we divorce for the same reasons that we marry,/ and we seduce the executioner when we desire/ to be hanged." More vivid and durable are the short poems about old age, old friends, sad memories, and younger versions of Hall himself. "Meatloaf" finds Hall "counting nine syllables on fingers/ discolored by old age and felt pens"; "Closing" remembers the poet and critic Liam Rector, while "The Offspring" imagines the grief of "an adolescent who was not here," the child that Hall and Kenyon could not have.

Starred review from August 1, 2011

Former U.S. poet laureate Hall's considerable fan base will welcome what is billed as his first full-length volume of poems in a decade, a mix of naughty, funny, sweet, and sad pieces about love, family, death, and the poignancy of things. The old rooms of his grandfather's farmhouse in New Hampshire, where Hall has lived since the 1970s, set the stage for recalled intimacies with his late wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, and recollections of the childhood that first brought him there, "too young for chores." One lovely poem, "Goosefeathers," retraces his boyhood train journey from the Connecticut shore to inland New Hampshire, as he moves through a progression of smaller and smaller enclosed conveyances into the feather bed in his grandfather's house. "Meatloaf" revisits a favorite topic, the relationship between baseball, abstraction, and art. Sex, food, baseball, suicide, adultery, and poetry--the poet sidesteps sentimentality as he counts out the measures of grief, disgust, and joy that conjure the vanished present: two married poets reading "under separate cones of light." VERDICT Featuring moving, amusing, musical poems about love, aging, and baseball, this work will have broad appeal and is recommended for all collections.--Ellen Kaufman, Baruch Coll., New York

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2011
Hall's been writing about approaching death ever since The Museum of Clear Ideas (1993). But, nine years after The Painted Bed, here's another collection, in which he confesses an octogenarian's further decrepitude but sure doesn't sound about to expirenot in the eldritch jump-rope rhyme, Apples Peaches, anyway. Many of the short poems in the book's first part are wholly or partly concerned with eros, lovemakingyou know, fucking. What's more, one of the three extra innings (an inning consists of nine stanzas of nine lines of nine syllablesa form Hall introduced in the nine-part Baseball in Museum) lets slip that Hall has (or has had, as the ruefully wry, repetitious Three Women may imply) another lover since the death of his wife, Jane Kenyon, whose towering, confessional masterpiece, Otherwise (1996), he helped assemble. After those inspirational pieces comes a long poem, Ric's Progress, about a hapless marriage, the husband's crash-and-burn when it fails, and his successful second try in middle agea marvelous piece of work that rather obviates many shelves' worth of earnest, middle-brow novels. A third section rummaging through Hall's personal past concludes. If the poems in it are relatively somber, they're equally witty, consummately well-crafted.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)