Unpacking the Boxes

By Marilyn Fritzler, Special to the Rocky

Published October 2, 2008 at 7 p.m.

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* Nonfiction. By Donald Hall. Houghton Mifflin, $24. Grade: A-

Book in a nutshell: What anchors memory? Poet Laureate (2006) Hall believes it's the stories, often repeated, that become legend; the transgressions and loss, including illness and death. Pausing, at 80, to look back on a New England childhood and his writing career, Hall displays an extraordinary capability for distilling meaning into words. His 208-page memoir often is thought-stopping in its succinct, one-line observations.

Hall was 26 and had just published his first book of poetry when his father died. The elder Hall - embittered by his own job choices, limited by a family dairy business - vowed that his son could pursue whatever he wanted. At age 14, Hall had selected "poet" for his profession. An only child, the poet was supported in his writing ambitions both by his parents and his maternal grandparents.

When Hall's mother died in 1994, she left 80 boxes of mementos, including many early manuscripts. Hall began the archeology that resulted in this book after losing his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, to leukemia.

Opening the first, writes Hall, "my childhood rose like a smoke of moths: a 78 of Connee Boswell singing The Kerry Dance; all the letters I ever wrote my father and mother; photographs of my young parents on the boardwalk at Atlantic City. . . . I felt the shock and exultation of exhumation."

In the memoir's seven chapters, Hall warmly offers up anecdote and insight. Domain explores childhood memories. Gaudeamus Igiter relives Hall's bittersweet but transformative Exeter experience, while Homecoming establishes the literary community he found at Harvard. In other chapters, Hall also recounts his time at Oxford, offers asides about writing and his first marriage and touches tenderly on his subsequent 23-year marriage to Kenyon. A humorous yet touching essay on aging, The Planet of Antiquity, closes the book.

Best tidbit: On learning to read in first grade: "One's life begins on so many occasions, constructing itself out of accident derived from coincidence compounded by character. (Only the last is ordained, if it is ordained.) "

Pros: This is a book for people who enjoy language - the value of a thing worth saying, well said.

Cons: Hall's memoir is self-referential; it helps to have read one or two of his books of poetry or prose.

Final word: Hall has published more than two dozen books of prose and poetry, written plays, biographies, children's books and textbooks on writing. This memoir offers a skeleton to his earlier works, beautifully illuminating their context: his life.

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