This week was my week to talk about books I read over the summer.
I think I might have to carry on and do a few more next week since Darcy Pattison’s declared it
Random Acts of Publicity Week.

Some people come up with the swellest ideas.

(Plus, I missed posting on Thursday and if I was going to do a week on books I really should’ve done a whole week.
I don’t know what happened to Thursday.
Did you guys have a Thursday at your house?
I think there might have been sun spots or something that zapped Thursday clean away.)

So, this may or may not be my last summer reading post.
Either way, I can say with conviction that I have really, really loved Donald Hall for quite some time.
And this summer I got that confirmed him by reading his memoir, Unpacking the Boxes.

It’s not so much that I admire every single thing he’s ever done or yearn for a life exactly like his (though there is a sacred sense of the idyllic in his New Hampshire writing life); it’s more that the honesty of growing into and through the poet that he became is disarmingly beautiful and moving.

There is loss and sorrow, of course, because he’s 80 and life works that way — in his case, the greatest grief reserved for his beloved wife, the poet Jane Kenyon who died of cancer. But there’s also tremendous good humor and lovely observations of the ordinary. It reminds me of the beginning bits of Stephen King’s  On Writing, where he just recounts who he was as a boy as sort of breadcrumb clues to who he became. Only Hall’s feels completely without pretense and, while not necessarily self deprecating, pure.

Today, on Poetry Friday, I thought I’d share Hall’s poem Ox Cart Man, which he later adapted and turned into one of my favorite picture books. Enjoy…

Ox Cart Man

by Donald Hall

(Read the rest here….)