Donald Hall

Présentation de l’éditeur
Ainsi commence un voyage lyrique à travers les jours et les semaines, les mois et les saisons changeantes de la vie d'un habitant de la Nouvelle-Angleterre et de sa famille.
L'homme au char à bœufs emballe ses marchandises - la laine de ses moutons, le châle que sa femme a fait, les mitaines que sa fille a tricotées et le lin qu'ils ont tissé. Il emballe les balais en bouleau que son fils a sculptés, et même un sac de plumes d'oie des oies de basse-cour.  
Il parcourt des collines, des vallées, des ruisseaux, des fermes et des villages. Au marché de Portsmouth, il vend ses marchandises, une par une - même son bœuf bien-aimé. Puis, les poches pleines de pièces, il erre dans le marché, achète des provisions pour sa famille et rentre chez lui. Et le cycle recommence.

Présentation de l’éditeur
In December of 1940, twelve-year-old Donnie Hall gets on a train from his comfortable Connecticut home to fulfill a dream: to spend Christmas with his grandparents on their farm on Eagle Pond in south central New Hampshire.
Once there, he settles into the routines he knows well from his summer visits: helping Gramps milk the cows, gathering eggs from the henhouse, chopping wood for the Glenwood in the kitchen.
Donnie arrives on a Sunday and is due to leave on Thursday. But Wednesday night, the nor'easter blows in and the farm is buried in two feet of snow. The road is unplowed; the car is useless. Will Donnie make it to the station in time to catch the train back to Boston?  
All this never happened. Donald Hall never did spend a childhood Christmas at Eagle Pond. But he knew all the stories from his mother and his grandparents and, now in his eighties, and having lived in that same house of his grandparents since 1975, he is in the perfect position to give himself "the thing I most wanted, a childhood Christmas at Eagle Pond."

Présentation de l’éditeur
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.

Sheila  Palley, Eagle Pond, early summer

here where I sat each fall
watching you pull your summer’s
garden up

Linda Wilson, Eagle Pond in October

Donald Hall tells of winter days as a youngster helping his grandfather fill the icehouse with huge chunks cut from the pond. Later, it was time to trudge from tree to tree collecting sap to be boiled into syrup.

In celebration of New England and the seasons, the poet laureate of New Hampshire records his love of place. The place is a 180-year-old farmland, Eagle Pond, the home of Hall's grandparents and now his home. "There's no reason to live here except for love," writes Hall as he describes the sight of huge Holsteins frolicking or, when impatient for the arrival of spring, he suggests pushing winter "off to a condominium in the keys of Antarctica."

View of Mount Kearsarge, as seen from the farm, c. 1930