The Painted Bed by Donald Hall

From the Publisher

Donald Hall's fourteenth collection opens with an epigraph from the Urdu poet Faiz: "The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved." In that poetic tradition, as in THE PAINTED BED, the beloved might be a person or something else - life itself, or the disappearing countryside. Hall's new poems further the themes of love, death, and mourning so powerfully introduced in his WITHOUT (1998), but from the distance of passed time. A long poem, "Daylilies on the Hill 1975 - 1989," moves back to the happy repossession of the poet's old family house and its history - a structure that "persisted against assaults" as its generations of residents could not. These poems are by turns furious and resigned, spirited and despairing - "mania is melancholy reversed," as Hall writes in another long poem, "Kill the Day." In this book's fourth and final section, "Ardor," the poet moves toward acceptance of new life in old age; eros reemerges.

Book Magazine

After Hall's wife, poet Jane Kenyon, died in 1995, the writer gained a new, dark muse who has influenced his last two poetry collections. With this book, Hall enters another stage of grief. In "Distressed Haiku," he writes, "You think that their / dying is the worst / thing that could happen // Then they stay dead." Every line of these seemingly simple, heartbreaking poems bears Hall's distinctive musical mark. His ear for rhythm and movement is flawless, confirming his position as a master of both open form and conventional rhymed verse. Hall's work exhibits the terrible suffering of the bereaved with dignity and beauty.
—Stephen Whited

Publishers Weekly

Hall has for decades been an eminent poet and critic; his previous book, Without (1999), was a raw collection of elegies for his late wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, that brought attention to their lives and work. More controlled, more varied and more powerful, this taut follow-up volume reexamines Hall's grief while exploring the life he has made since. The book's first poem, "Kill the Day," stands among the best Hall has ever written. It examines mourning in 16 long-lined stanzas, alternating catalogue with aphorism, understatement with keened lament: "How many times will he die in his own lifetime?" Two groups of terse, short-lined free verse proffer stories and moments from Kenyon's last days and from Hall's first days without her: "You think that their dying is the worst thing that could happen. Then they stay dead." Subsequent brief stanzaic lyrics take both epigraph and method from Thomas Hardy's poems on the loss of his wife: some will please both Hardy's fans and Hall's. But even those fans may skip "Daylilies on the Hill," a lengthy and overly detailed verse history of the by now familiar New Hampshire house that Hall and Kenyon shared. The book's last poems range from raunchy to wise as they explore sex in later age "Sometimes our red fitted sheets maneuvered to embrace us like pythons." The final poem, ironically called "Affirmation," contains a more typical and typically stark prediction: "If a new love carries us past middle age, our wife will die at her strongest and most beautiful." (Apr.) Forecast: The press blitz that accompanied Without won't materialize here, but it won't matter to Hall's (and Kenyon's) many readers. Look for broader reviews centered on the poetry of illness and grief that could include this book, Alan Shapiro's Song & Dance (Forecasts, Dec. 17, 2001), Linda Pastan's The Last Uncle (Forecasts, Jan. 21) and Donald Revell's Arcady (reviewed below). Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

Her Garden

I let her garden go.

let it go, let it go How can I watch the hummingbird

Hover to sip

With its beak’s tip The purple bee balm—whirring as we heard

It years ago?

The weeds rise rank and thick

let it go, let it go Where annuals grew and burdock grows,

Where standing she

At once could see The peony, the lily, and the rose

Rise over brick

She’d laid in patterns. Moss

let it go, let it go Turns the bricks green, softening them

By the gray rocks

Where hollyhocks That lofted while she lived, stem by tall stem,

Dwindle in loss.

Affirmation

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage, that began without harm, scatters into debris on the shore, and a friend from school drops cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us past middle age, our wife will die at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces that she is temporary is temporary. The bold woman, middle-aged against our old age, sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond’s edge and affirm that it is fitting and delicious to lose everything.

Copyright © 2002 by Donald Hall. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.