The Painted Bed : Poems

Rating:
Summary: On Death and Dying
Review: At 47 Jane Kenyon, much younger than her husband Donald Hall, should have buried him; but that was not meant to be. In this slim volume of poetry, Hall writes eloquently of his wife's death, his love for her, his grief, despair and eventual acceptance of life without his wife. The poems are best if read straight through. They are highly personal, sometimes almost embarrassingly so. We should thank Mr. Hall for sharing his most intimate thoughts on such a private and painful subject.

Mr. Hall's imagery is beautiful. Listen to the opening lines of "Kill The Day."

"When she died it was as if her car accelerated
off the pier's end and zoomed upward over death water
for a year without gaining or losing altitude. . . "

In the poem "Ardor" lust is described as "grief that has turned over in bed to look the other way." Finally in the concluding poem in the book "Affirmation" Hall describes the indifference of the young to growing old with this wonderful image: "we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content."

These poems bring, if not comfort, at least the knowldge that we are not alone in our own losses. As in all good art, the particular becomes the universal.

Rating:
Summary: gets a bit weighty
Review: Donald Hall's collection The Painted Bed sort of does more of the same, lamenting the loss of his wife. A poem or two is one thing, but whole book? There are some good poems in this book, both of the long poems are pretty good ("Kill the Day" & "Daylillies on the Hill"). Hall's painted bed is just too much, though I also thought "Impossible Lovers" was pretty good.

Rating:
Summary: On Death and Dying
Review: Hall's verse not only vivifies the one he mourns for, but also awakens and afflicts the reader with a sympathetic alertness; moreover, the stanzas of the poems, both rhymed and un-, represent his best writing in verse since the days of "The One Day." Perhaps such evaluations are an impertinence as we ponder poems born of such grief; nonetheless, Hall deserves praise for his esthetic accomplishment and his intimately human voice. The language does not falter.

If the price of a hardcover book proves prohibitive, one might fly to the nearest bookstore, pluck "The Painted Bed" from the shelves, and sit on a chair or a patch of carpet and receive these words as one might receive the language of a liturgy. The stations of Hall's grief are composed of stately phrases and living words. Few books of poetry can be described with justice as necessary to acquire and to absorb; Hall's collection of elegies is such a book -- vital in the sense of necessary, and in the sense of helping one to live.

Rating:
Summary: Magnificent
Review: Heartbreak recollected in sublimity. The long "Daylilies" poem tells of the loss of the poet's family members over two centuries in his New Hampshire farmhouse. Walls, beams, lathe, handmade nails, everything about the house goes into a sense of infinite loss over the centuries and parallels the loss of his wife. We all go into the night, but it's great to go in the hands of a poet like Hall.