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(More customer reviews)When I was growing up in suburban New York, my parents sent me to a summer camp in rural New Hampshire for a number of summers. During these summers, I fell in love with the beauty and ruggedness of New Hampshire. I spent my summers riding horses, hiking mountains and swimming in ice cold lakes. I also spent my summers swatting mosquitoes and battling poison ivy. Donald Hall's anthology, Eagle Pond, brought back memories of these summers long gone, evoking memories both sweet and bitter-sweet. Hall's writing is lyrical and poetic, using words sparingly to evoke sounds, thoughts and memories. His commentary on the shallowness of our lives when they are based purely on the present and lack historical depth is right on target.
I wish that I had read Hall's works separately. Unfortunately, they do not work too well together in anthology form. There is too much repetition, which sometimes gets annoying. This repetition is necessary if each volume stands alone, but it becomes redundant in anthology form. This does not decrease the beauty of the writing, but it does lessen the beauty of the book as a whole.
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This original paperback brings together for the first time all of Donald Hall's writing on Eagle Pond Farm, his ancestral home in New Hampshire, where he visited his grandparents as a young boy and then lived with his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, until her death. It includes the entire, previously published Seasons at Eagle Pond and Here at Eagle Pond; the poem "Daylilies on the Hill" from The Painted Bed; and several uncollected pieces. In these tender essays, Hall tells of the joys and quiddities of life on the farm, the pleasures and discomforts of a world in which the year has four seasons -- maple sugar, blackfly, Red Sox, and winter. Lyrical, comic, and elegaic, they sing of a landscape and culture that are disappearing under the assault of change.
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