Eagle Pond Farm, familiar even to casual readers of poet Donald Hall (author of 13 volumes of poetry spanning over 40 years), constitutes his spiritual and geographic center. He moved there permanently in 1975 after marrying the young and talented poet Jane Kenyon. His long relationship to Eagle Pond Farm and the creative haven the two poets created gives Without a special poignancy. It is where, in 1995, Jane Kenyon died.

The facts are hard but simple. In 1994, Jane Kenyon--who at 46 was beginning to enjoy the growing recognition of her work--was diagnosed with leukemia. Kenyon and Hall opted for the harrowing bone marrow transplant, to be performed in Seattle. It was not successful, and 12 weeks later, she was dead. Hall began drafting Without during the procedure and subsequent treatment, an act almost impossible to imagine--or perhaps for a poet, the only act possible in the face of what for most would be unspeakable. The magnitude of such suffering might indeed explain the collection's flatness of tone, as if grief can be touched only across great distances.

However restrained the pieces, Hall's gaze is fearless. Shifts in voice (he writes both in first and third person) create a tension that pulls the reader forward, as if compelled to consume this moving, raw account in one sitting. The quality of reader attention is more akin to what one gives a story. Narrative elements include a terse account of the bone-marrow transplant and Kenyan's subsequent radiation treatments ("It was as if she capped the Chernobyl pile with her body"), and it's here that the poems become almost unbearable to read.

Without captures the tedium of dying, jolted by surges of rage and "witless" love. Numbly, it lists the flinty details of Kenyon's last days, spent choosing the poems for her last volume, Otherwise: New & Selected Poems. It describes the moment of her dying in a way that makes one wonder if the ultimate experience of intimacy is to watch the beloved die, to be the one to close her eyes. "Back home from the grave," Hall writes toward the end of this volume, "behind my desk I made / a gallery of Janes," but it can be said that every poem presents a facet of his wife while dying, accruing finally to a gallery of love and grief.

There are some distinguishing jolts to our familiar concepts about death as in, for example, the poem showing the couple, with their minister, praying and holding hands. And when they prayed, "grace was evident / but not the comfort of mercy or reprieve / The embodied figure / on the cross still twisted under the sun." By and large, however, it's a volume not remarkable for bold imagery or shocking connections; rather for the expression of raw grief that follows, unwelcome, all of our necessary losses. --Hollis Giammatteo


The Atlantic Monthly, Phoebe-Lou Adams
Mr. Hall's poems on the death of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, are direct, devoid of obvious poetic devices, dependent on ordinary words and the patterns of the speaking voice. That voice, however, is extraordinarily moving as it evokes helplessness amid the tangle of medical equipment, the pain of watching a loved partner die, the feel of a house where "Your presence ... is almost as enormous / and painful as your absence." With the dog on one side of the bed and the cat curled on the other, he notes, "I'm what they've got; / they know it," and leaves the reader to finish the thought. Summed up in "Remembered happiness is agony; / so is remembered agony," the anguish of loss strikes like a fist.


From Booklist
Three years ago, as cancer destroyed his wife, Jane Kenyon, Hall helped her assemble her last book, Otherwise (1996), which stands with Langston Hughes' great Selected Poems (1959) as a classic of poetic self-presentation. Now he adds to her masterpiece a hard pendant of his own, a collection concerned with her last days, her dying, and his grief. These poems are less brilliant by far than the virtually saltating verse in The Museum of Clear Ideas (1993) and The Old Life (1996). They are near-cruelly blunt about Kenyon's physical deterioration and Hall's own indecorous, raging sadness; for instance, when he recalls an abashing incident while alone for the first time at Christmas--" sick with longing, / I press my penis / into zinc and butcherblock." Many who have lost a mate will recognize this amalgam of lust and despair. They will also feel again that weird weightlessness of the heart when, in the same poem, Hall reports, in a non sequitur, "Yesterday I caught sight of you / in the Kearsarge Mini-Mart." Ray Olson


The New York Review of Books, John Bayley
Hall's extraordinarily clear awareness of what is over and gone is more present and more appealing in words now than it could have found room to be in life.... It is as if they were not poems at all but experiences undergone with and by another human being.


Book Description
Donald Hall's poignant and courageous poetry speaks of the death of the magnificent, humorous, and gifted Jane Kenyon. Hall speaks to us all of grief, as a poet lamenting the death of a poet, as a husband mourning the loss of a wife. Without is Hall's greatest and most honorable achievement-his gift and testimony, his lament and his celebration of loss and of love.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
The death of a beloved wife and fellow poet makes for a bleak and lonely tale. But Donald Hall's poignant and courageous poetry, facing that dread fact, involves us all: the magnificent, humorous, and gifted woman, Jane Kenyon, who suffered and died; the doctors and nurses who tried but failed to save her; the neighbors, friends, and relatives who grieved for her; the husband who sat by her while she lived and afterward sat in their house alone with his pain, self-pity, and fury; and those of us who until now had nothing to do with these people.

As Donald Hall writes, "Remembered happiness is agony; so is remembered agony." Without will touch every feeling reader, for everyone has suffered loss and requires the fellowship of elegy. In the earth's oldest poem, when Gilgamesh howls upon the death of Enkidu, a grieving reader of our own time may feel a kinship, across the abyss of 4,000 years, with a Sumerian king. In Without, Donald Hall speaks to us all of grief, as a poet lamenting the death of a poet and as a husband mourning the loss of a wife. Without is Hall's greatest and most honorable achievement — his gift and testimony, his lament and celebration, of loss and of love.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The dying of a beloved wife and fellow poet makes for a bleak and lonely tale. But Donald Hall's poignant and courageous poetry, facing that dread fact, involves us all: the magnificent, humorous, and gifted woman, Jane Kenyon, who suffered and died; the doctors and nurses who tried but failed to save her; the neighbors, friends, and relatives who grieved for her; the husband who sat by her while she lived and afterward sat in their house alone with his pain, self-pity, and fury; and those of us who until now had nothing to do with it.

FROM THE CRITICS

Vanity Fair