The Painted Bed

Donald Hall''s fourteenth collection opens with an epigraph from the Urdu poet Faiz: The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved. In that poetic tradition as in THE PAINTED BED the beloved might be a person or something else - life itself or the disappearing countryside. Hall''s new poems further the themes of love death and mourning so powerfully introduced in his WITHOUT (1998) but from the distance of passed time. A long poem Daylilies on the Hill 1975 - 1989 moves back to the happy repossession of the poet''s old family house and its history - a structure that persisted against assaults as its generations of residents could not. These poems are by turns furious and resigned spirited and despairing - mania is melancholy reversed as Hall writes in another long poem Kill the Day. In this book''s fourth and final section Ardor the poet moves toward acceptance of new life in old age; eros reemerges.