Without: Poems

How Donald Hall manages to capture the pain, fear, loneliness, and desolation of losing someone you love, all the while doing it with honesty, grace, and lyricism is testimony to his deep love and noble spirit, and his poetic genius. This book is a gift to the reader...

I lost my husband of 34 years last year to cancer, and when Donald Hall died recently I learned that he had suffered the same loss. It has been clear to me for awhile that for me there have been two distinct parts of the loss. One has been the obvious and immense emptiness left without my soulmate. But the other is traumatic and different. It is that time when my husband was ill and I was trying to both care for him and keep him with me against all odds. This gem of a book speaks to both our long life together plus the months of impending loss and increasing illness. To me, the shock of hearing the diagnosis and the trauma of the ensuing months is never spoken of, but Hall has written beautiful and honest poetry to help us open up and really feel that time. And now I am navigating life without him, and Hall's poetry shows me that I am not alone.

A powerful jumble of poems (sometimes called "letters" in Hall's parlance) re-experiencing the death of his younger lover, conscious always that he "should" have died before her. Poignant detail and when maudlin, appropriately so. Utterly heartbreaking and yet funny, aS when Hall and his dog Gus hike up to her grave and he feels the need to specify which of the two pissed on her tombstone.

I was raised reading Emily Dickinson and Anne Sexton. I ordered this collection of poetry based on the recommendation of a friend. I can honestly say that I have never been more pleased with a poet since I fell in love with the magnified sorrow of Sylvia Plath. From beginning to end, this collection of poems is a poignant account of the emotions as Hall witnesses his wife's slow decline. This is a must read for anyone who claims to be an expert of poetry.

These poems--simple, accessible, profoundly beautiful--do much to illustrate just how much can be accomplished with well-wrought language. If you're reading this, you're probably already familiar with the subject matter of these poems. If not, though, know that these poems almost exclusively deal with the dying--and death--of Hall's wife from cancer. They're heavy but never ponderous. There's a wonderful elegance here, a brevity that makes this book something that pretty much any reader can relate to. I was already familiar with Donald Hall's work but this book is in a league all its own. In my opinion, it's the finest work of Hall's illustrious career.

Good Deal.

An intense record of the poet’s long grief watching his true love lose the battle with cancer, I sent this to a friend who recently lost her partner to cancer, in case she needed to spend time with someone who understands.

Heartbreaking, honest, and beautiful. Hall is one of my favorites.

A breathtaking collection of poems, dedicated to his late and much-loved wife. Watch him read Without on Youtube. Astounding.

These poems are about the illness and death of Hall's wife, Jane. They are free verse in the best sense - like clear water with nothing to make it coloured or sweet or bubbly. This water flows clearly, too. It follows the contours of the death of his wife including all the boulders and pebbles, the mud and the weeds, the sweep and the fall. This poetry uses no devices but it is poetic in its sensibility. It captures something inherently ungraspable: what it is to lose someone you love. And more: what it is to go through such a loss with its blood-oxygen numbers and Total Body Irradiation and vomit. Plus that which goes beyond all of that. "When she no longer spoke, they lay alone together, touching, and she fixed on him her beautiful enormous round brown eyes, shining, unblinking, and passionate with love and dread." It is all given and it is all taken away.