Good morning, everyone – and welcome back. You probably find it as hard to believe as I do that this summer, the summer we barely had or barely experienced, has come to an end. The kids are back at school or off to college for the first or another time, and we may be ready to think again about what gives us pleasure. One such thing is poetry.

Our page this month was to be a tribute to Donald Hall – the living Donald Hall – but we’ve lost him at 89. Another of the great generation of American poets gone, along with a favorite and gifted student of his, Tom Clark, who died after being struck by a car in Berkeley, California.

Like all poets, Hall was concerned with love and death, and his latest book confirms this. A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety, came out in June of this year, a memoir that reads like a long conversation we might have had with him in the New Hampshire house he inherited from his family and where he lived with his wife, poet Jane Kenyon, who predeceased him and for whom he was still mourning. His Essays after Eighty, published in 2014, one critic called a memento mori. Together, the two books comprise as much of his autobiography as we have not been able to gather from his poems. What I found saddest was that he had decided he could now write only prose. Although he has always been a fine prose stylist, I missed those Donald Hall poems and wanted more.

I hope you’ll forgive me if I share one of my own, from my book, Rehearsal (IPBooks, 2018):

Letter to Donald Hall