Donald Hall (NYT photo by Bob LaPree) |
His plainspoken verse and deep respect for nature reminds readers of Robert Frost and earned Hall the position of poet laureate in 2006. The son of an unhappy dairy farmer, he grew up in suburban Connecticut, but in 1975 moved to the New Hampshire farm that had been in his family for generations; he would live there for the rest of his life.
A prolific writer, Hall wrote not only poetry but essays, short stories, plays, textbooks, children's books and memoirs. As a diehard Boston Red Sox fan, he wrote two books about baseball that rang with Hall's poetic flair: In Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball, he wrote "In the country of baseball, time is the air we breathe, and the wind swirls us backward and forward, until we seem so reckoned in time and seasons that all time and all seasons become the same," Kirby reports.
He received a National Medal of Arts in 2011 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. "His other honors include two Guggenheim fellowships, the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Silver medal and the Ruth Lilly Prize for poetry," Kirby reports.
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