Donald Hall has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Donald Hall.
Donald Hall
Summary
Author of more than 30 books of poetry and prose, Donald Hall performs dozens of his best-loved poems, together with excerpts from 6 of his works of prose. Bursting with the passion of living, yet reverent of time and place, Hall's evocative style has made him one of America's foremost poets. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Robert Frost Medal of the Poetry Society of America, and the New England Book Award for nonfiction, and former Poet Laureate of New Hampshire, he gives each listener this gift of words - words painstakingly entwined with energy and love. Donald Hall: Prose and Poetry is a tour de force, an intimate convergence of poet, author, and listener.
(P)1997 Audio Bookshelf
A Carnival of Losses
Summary
“Hall lived long enough to leave behind two final books, memento mori titled Essays After Eighty (2014) and now A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety. They’re up there with the best things he did.” -Dwight Garner, New York Times
From the former poet laureate of the United States, essays from the vantage point of very old age
Donald Hall lived a remarkable life of letters, one capped most recently by the New York Times bestseller Essays After Eighty, a “treasure” of a book in which he “balance[s] frankness about losses with humor and gratitude” (Washington Post). Before his passing in 2018, nearing ninety, Hall delivered this new collection of self-knowing, fierce, and funny essays on aging, the pleasures of solitude, and the sometimes astonishing freedoms arising from both. He intersperses memories of exuberant days - as in Paris, 1951, with a French girl memorably inclined to say, “I couldn’t care less” - with writing, visceral and hilarious, on what he has called the “unknown, unanticipated galaxy” of extreme old age.
“Why should a nonagenarian hold anything back?” Hall answers his own question by revealing several vivid instances of “the worst thing I ever did," and through equally uncensored tales of literary friendships spanning decades, with James Wright, Richard Wilbur, Seamus Heaney, and other luminaries.
Cementing his place alongside Roger Angell and Joan Didion as a generous and profound chronicler of loss, Hall returns to the death of his beloved wife, Jane Kenyon, in an essay as original and searing as anything he's written in his extraordinary literary lifetime.
©2018 Donald Hall (P)2018 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
Essays After Eighty
Summary
Donald Hall has lived a remarkable life of letters, a career capped by a National Medal of the Arts, awarded by the president. Now, in the "unknown, unanticipated galaxy" of very old age, he is writing searching essays that startle, move, and delight. Hall paints his past: "Decades followed each other - 30 was terrifying, 40 I never noticed because I was drunk, 50 was best with a total change of life, 60 extended the bliss of 50...." And, poignantly, often joyfully, he limns his present: "When I turned 80 and rubbed testosterone on my chest, my beard roared like a lion and gained four inches." Most memorably, Hall writes about his enduring love affair with his ancestral Eagle Pond Farm, and with the writing life that sustains him every day.
©2014 Donald Hall (P)2015 Tantor