Donald Hall, The Selected Poems of Donald Hall ****

A perfect companion to Essays After Eighty, this slim volume is Hall's personal choice of his own favorite poems. It starts out strong with "My Son My Executioner":

My son, my executioner.
   I take you in my arms.
Quiet and small and just astir
   And whom my body warms.

Sweet death, small son, our instrument
   Of immortality.
Your cries and hungers document
   Our bodily decay.

We twenty-five and twenty-two,
   Who seemed to live forever,
Observe enduring life in you
   And start to die together. 

The poems appear in roughly chronological order (I would have liked writing or publication dates), which enables you to see his development as a poet. He experiments with different styles, but his themes remain consistent: as he says, he writes about "love, death, and New Hampshire." More specifically, many poems contrast the endurance/recurrence of nature with the transience of human life. There are also a few about how our stuff outlasts us. Are these themes reflective of Hall's seven decades of writing or of his current preferences as an editor?

I don't like (or understand) every poem, but the hit percentage is high. The book is full of striking images and is the perfect digestible length for poetry.