Life Work

When Donald Hall moved to his grandparents' New Hampshire farm in 1975, his work as a writer must have seemed remote from the harsh physical labor of his ancestors. Hall, a prize-winning poet and author of several dozen books, has devoted his life to the literary arts. In this paean to work, Hall reveals a similar kind of artistry in the lives of his grandparents, Kate and Wesley. From them he learned that the devotion to craft - be it canning vegetables, writing poems, or carting manure - creates its own special discipline and an "absorbedness" that no wage can compensate. Hall has given us affectionate portraits of his New Hampshire clan in String Too Short to Be Saved, the Eagle Pond books, and the bestselling children's book Ox-Cart Man. In Life Work, we see how the writer has modeled his own life on his family's lives of work, solitude, and love. When Hall comes face to face with his own mortality halfway through writing this book, we understand both his obsession with work and its ultimate consolation.