Essays After Eighty, Paperback

Descriere

""Alternately lyrical and laugh-out-loud funny.""--New York Times ""Deliciously readable . . . Donald Hall, if abandoned by the muse of poetry, has wrought his prose to a keen autumnal edge."" -- Wall Street Journal His entire life, Donald Hall has dedicated himself to the written word, putting together a storied career as a poet, essayist, and memoirist. Now, in the ""unknown, unanticipated galaxy"" of very old age, he is writing essays that startle, move, and delight. In Essays After Eighty, Hall ruminates on his past: ""thirty was terrifying, forty I never noticed because I was drunk, fifty was best with a total change of life, sixty extended the bliss of fifty . . ."" He also addresses his present: ""When I turned eighty and rubbed testosterone on my chest, my beard roared like a lion and gained four inches."" Most memorably, Hall writes about his enduring love affair with his ancestral Eagle Pond Farm and with the writing life that sustains him every day: ""Yesterday my first nap was at 9: 30 a. m., but when I awoke I wrote again."" ""Alluring, inspirational hominess . . . Essays After Eighty is a treasure . . . balancing frankness about losses with humor and gratitude."" -- Washington Post ""A fine book of remembering all sorts of things past, Essays After Eighty is to be treasured."" -- Boston Globe