Here is a fat animal, a bear
that is partly a dodo.
Ridiculous wings hang at his shoulders
as if they were collarbones
while he plods in the bad brickyards
at the edge of the city, smiling
and eating flowers. He eats them
because he loves them
because they are beautiful
because they love him.
It is eating flowers which makes him so fat.
He carries his huge stomach
over the gutters of damp leaves
in the parking lots in October,
but inside that paunch
he knows there are fields of lupine
and meadows of mustard and poppy.
He encloses sunshine.
Winds bend the flowers
in combers across the valley,
birds hang on the stiff wind,
at night there are showers, and the sun
lifts through a haze every morning
of the summer in the stomach.
“Self-Portrait As A Bear” is excerpted from White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems, 1946-2006, by Donald Hall. Copyright © 2006 by Donald Hall. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Read Constance’s thank-you note about Robert Bly, bone cancer, and how Don’s response was the final link in her chain of healing.
DONALD HALL was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1928. He received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard College in 1951, and in 1953 his bachelor’s in literature from Oxford University. For the past thirty years he has lived on Eagle Pond Farm in rural New Hampshire, in the house where his grandmother and mother were born. He has two children from his first marriage and five grandchildren. He was married for twenty-three years to the poet Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995. In 1998, he published Without (Houghton Mifflin), a collection of poems expressing his grief over Kenyon’s death, for which The New York Review of Books wrote: “The mosaic of a whole period, with all its inner moods and its physical accessories, is masterfully accomplished.”
Hall has published fifteen books of poetry, beginning with Exiles and Marriages in 1955. In 2006, he published White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946–2006 (Houghton Mifflin), a volume of his essential life’s work. Among his books for children, Ox-Cart Man won the Caldecott Medal. His twenty books of prose include Willow Temple: New and Selected Stories (2003), The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon (2005), and a collection of his essays about poetry, Breakfast Served Any Time All Day (2003). He was for five years Poet Laureate of his home state, New Hampshire and has written extensively about life there — Seasons at Eagle Pond (1987), Here at Eagle Pond (2000) and Eagle Pond (2007) .
For his poetry, Donald Hall received the Marshall/Nation Award in 1987 for his The Happy Man; both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award in 1988 for The One Day; the Lily Prize for Poetry in 1994; and two Guggenheim Fellowships. He is recipient of the Frost Medal and the Lamont Poetry Prize. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Donald Hall was the 14th U.S. Poet Laureate, serving the post 2006-2007.
This collection brings together for the first time all of Hall's writing on Eagle Pond Farm, his ancestral home in New Hampshire. It includes "Seasons at Eagle Pond" and "Here at Eagle Pond," the poem RDaylilies on the Hill, S and other essays.
In these tender essays, Hall shares his memories and thoughts on growing up in New Hampshire on his grandparent's dairy farm, of the seasons, and of his connection to the land, his family, and his coming home.
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