Here at Eagle Pond

by Donald Hall

Overview

HERE AT EAGLE POND is Donald Hall's remarkable collection of essays about the permanent and transparent memory of place and of his coming home to Eagle Pond, New Hampshire, where he grew up and returned to live with his wife Jane Kenyon at the age of 45, where he began writing poems at the age of twelve, and where his ancestors made their livings by free-lancing as farmers. In these tender essays, Hall tells of the joys and quiddities of life in the ancestral New Hampshire place formerly worked as a dairy farm by his grandparents; of the comforts and discomforts of a world in which the year has four seasons—maple sugar, blackfly, Red Sox, and winter. These essays are also Donald Hall's letters to friends, answers to such life-altering questions as: "What would our lives be like, living here at Eagle Pond, in solitude among relics and memories, in a countryside of birches and GMC pickups?" And they are ghost stories as well: vivid descriptions of Hall's intimate connection with the land and with his family past. Most importantly, HERE AT EAGLE POND is Donald Hall's coming home to language.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780618084739
Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date:	10/01/2000
Pages:	158
Product dimensions:	5.87(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.18(d)

About the Author

DONALD HALL, who served as poet laureate of the United States from 2006 to 2007, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a recipient of the National Medal of the Arts, awarded by the president. He lives in New Hampshire.

Table of Contents

	Introduction: the Letter Farm	ix
	Why We Live Here	1
	Keeping Things	8
	Perennials	20
	The Fire that Never Went Out	26
	The Embrace of Old Age	30
	To Walk a Dog	34
	The One Thousand Seasons	36
	Good Use for Bad Weather	42
	October's Omens	45
	A Good Foot of Snow	49
	Heman Chase's Corners	52
	Reasons for Hating Vermont	61
	The Radio Red Sox	66
	Living Room Politics	70
	Rusticus	77
	I Love My Dish	103
	The Rooster and the Silo	109
	Centuries of Cousins	112
	Country Matters	115
	My New England	118
	Fifty People Talking	131

Editorial Reviews

"New Hampshire has found its champion." Kirkus Reviews

“The freshest in Donald Hall’s series of New England landscapes in prose.”

The Washington Post

From the Publisher

A companion to Seasons at Eagle Pond , these witty and perceptive essays capture the essence of New England, past and present. From his ancestral home in Wilmot, N.H., poet Hall reminisces about his childhood, family history and the pleasures of country life. In ``Rusticus'' he discusses rural culture and its independence, conservatism and sense of continuity. How do New Hampshire citizens feel about their presidential primary? See ``Living Room Politics.'' Hall takes jabs at neighboring Vermont; he ruminates on the weather--the seasons are maple sugar, blackfly, Red Sox and winter--and draws a composite picture of the countryfolk. Hall is to New Hampshire what John Gould is to Maine. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

As an advocate for rural New England life, Hall has no equal. In this collection of essays, a successor to Seasons at Eagle Pond ( LJ 12/87), the prize-winning poet and one-time poet laureate of New Hampshire laments the encroachment of suburbia, the coming of the ``condosaurus,'' and the influx of senior citizens into his home state. Ranging in subject matter from the joy of the woodburning cookstove to the rural American to the New Hampshire political system, Hall writes with grace and humor, capturing the spirit of those who make ``Live Free or Die'' their motto. Recommended for all who love New England and enjoy skillful writing.-- Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo

Library Journal