A review by tomhill
Essays After Eighty by Donald Hall

4.0

The essays aren't as emotionally resonant or as beautifully written as they might be, given the quality of Donald Hall's poetry, and they also lack the deep insight of the personal essays of say, Andre Dubus. They are comforting and clever, and offer a glimpse of Hall's life, both before and after reaching age eighty. The haunting cover image of a close-up Hall, sporting the wild, untrimmed beard that defined his look in old age sets the tone for this collection. The essays deal with a lot of the same themes his poetry does: the past, memory, death, grief, but also like his poetry, they focus on the lighter aspects of life and aging. Hall writes of dogs, and horses and farm life and his grandparents, his wives and children, cigarettes, facial hair, his trips to D.C. The common theme is the steady march of time through all of it. Especially fascinating and tragic and ironic is Hall's battle with both colon and liver cancer when he was in his early sixties and his unlikely longevity, contrasted with his wife Jane Kenyon's quick decline from cancer. I believe he's written about it more in-depth elsewhere, but Jane Kenyon's death and its wrongness seem to creep in at the edges of nearly every essay.