Must-Read Poetry – Donald Hall’s Without

I just finished reading Without, a collection of poems by Donald Hall, formerly the U.S. Poet Laureate. It’s easily the most powerful book of poems I’ve read in a long time.

In the first half of Without, Hall holds nothing back in his telling of the final weeks and months of his wife’s battle with leukemia. In the second half, Hall pours out one heart-wrenching line after another in a series of letters written as poems to her as he struggles to move on after her death.

The poems take an even deeper turn when you learn that Jane Kenyon, a well-known and excellent poet herself, was his wife. Having read some of her work in the past, I found exploring the literal and figurative marriage of their poetry brought out even more for me. After getting acquainted with them through some of their other poems and imagining the lives of these two soulful people together, the sense of the world crashing down in Without is all the more powerful.

When I imagined myself in his shoes with my wife in her place and let myself try to feel what was going through him, the book blew me away. Hall lays out a bare, pure truth in this work. We may be perfectly healthy now, but anticipating the possibility of such future grief is inescapable while reading this book. Hall brings us to understand that one cannot truly love without risking such terrible grief and loss, but that the alternative is a far worse fate.

To give you a sample, I found one of the poems from Without -
“Letter in Autumn” – on The Writer’s Almanac web site.

If you enjoy poetry at all, this book is a must read.