Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry [Kindle Edition]

I first discovered Donald Hall when teaching high school English. Hundreds of my students, through the years, read his classic "My Son My Executioner" in my class, and since first discovering that poem at an AP conference, I've read everything I can find that he's written. This memoir is a gentle, moving, ultimately rather heartbreaking book. I recommend it.

One might be excused for thinking that Donald Hall, Poet Laureate of the United States in 2006-2007, has written as many memoirs as he has books of poetry. I may well be off by one or two (either way), but by my count UNPACKING THE BOXES is his seventh memoir. Years ago I read two of his earlier ones ("String Too Short To Be Saved" and "Life Work"), and they proved to be easy, moderately interesting and literate reads. UNPACKING THE BOXES can be described in the same way, but it doesn't quite measure up to those previous two. Maybe it has something to do with my own aging, rather than (or in addition to) Donald Hall's.

In any event, UNPACKING THE BOXES basically covers the stages of youth and old age of Donald Hall. The first three-quarters of this memoir cover his childhood in Hamden, Connecticut, schooling at Exeter, Harvard, and Oxford, and teaching at the University of Michigan. Throughout this discussion, Hall gives particular emphasis to his enthusiasm for poetry and his education and development as a poet. As a parenthetical, it is remarkable how many other distinguished poets were fellow students with Hall at Harvard circa 1950 -- for example, John Ashberry, Robert Bly, Kenneth Koch, and Adrienne Rich. At Michigan, Hall met Jane Kenyon (she was one of his students) and eventually she became his second wife. In other books, Hall has written about their 20+ years together, mostly in New Hampshire, and about her death from leukemia. The last quarter of UNPACKING THE BOXES deals with Hall's life after Jane's death, including three years of intense and debilitating grief and then Hall's own struggles with the decrepitudes of old age (he writes the book as an octogenarian).

Throughout, Hall seems to be forthright, even when the result does not reflect very favorably on him. At times, especially in the last quarter of the book when discussing his inner psychological turmoil brought on by the illness and death of Jane Kenyon, Hall's account becomes rather uncomfortable, and once again I encounter a writer who has relinquished drapes of personal privacy that I would never let drop. Does art really demand such baring of the soul or psyche?

UNPACKING THE BOXES should be of moderate interest to devotees of post-WWII American poetry, and perhaps of keen interest to fans of Donald Hall or Jane Kenyon. For the rest of us, it is, I fear, somewhat on the tepid side.

When former U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall lost his mother in 1994, he packed up everything from her house and moved the boxes, unopened, to his own cottage. His wife, Jane Kenyon, died the following year; and Hall mourned his closest losses at length. Only the passage of time gave him the impetus to finally go back and "unpack the boxes." What he uncovered were the memories of his childhood and the stories of his parents' lives, jogged into the present by tokens, mementos, scraps, and photographs. He shares those remembered scenes with us on these pages.

This memoir, then, covers his early years in New Haven, Connecticut; his schooling at Exeter in New Hampshire; his undergraduate study at Harvard; and additional education in Europe. Always in the background is the lure of his grandparents' farm in New Hampshire, a sanctuary and a retreat from those other "civilized" experiences. We shouldn't be surprised that he eventually chooses to live there, later in life. Since Hall documented Jane's life and death in the book "The Best Day the Worst Day," he skips over most of those details here. He does delve into his resulting despondency. And then he gets the call in 2006 -- a fax, really -- that he's been named the Poet Laureate. He's excited, he accepts, and that's the end of this volume.

I saw Donald Hall in person at the live broadcast of "A Prairie Home Companion" at Tanglewood in June 2008. I knew little of him before that night, I'm afraid to say. But after finishing this book, I can't wait to read more. Now I'll have to catch up by going back to all of his previous books.