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String Too Short to Be Saved: Recollections of Summers on a New England Farm
This is a collection of stories diverse in subject, but sutured together by the limitless affection the author holds for the land and the people of New England. Donald Hall tells about life on a small farm where, as a boy, he spent summers with his grandparents. Gradually the boy grows to be a young man, sees his grandparents aging, the farm become marginal, and finally, the cows sold and the barn abandoned.
But these are more than nostalgic memories, for in the measured and tender prose of each episode are signs of the end of things - a childhood, perhaps a culture.
But these are more than nostalgic memories, for in the measured and tender prose of each episode are signs of the end of things - a childhood, perhaps a culture.
155 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1980
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1070 people want to read
About the author
Donald Hall
176 books199 followersDonald Hall was considered one of the major American poets of his generation.
His poetry explores the longing for a more bucolic past and reflects the poet’s abiding reverence for nature. Although Hall gained early success with his first collection, Exiles and Marriages (1955), his later poetry is generally regarded as the best of his career. Often compared favorably with such writers as James Dickey, Robert Bly, and James Wright, Hall used simple, direct language to evoke surrealistic imagery. In addition to his poetry, Hall built a respected body of prose that includes essays, short fiction, plays, and children’s books. Hall, who lived on the New Hampshire farm he visited in summers as a boy, was also noted for the anthologies he has edited and is a popular teacher, speaker, and reader of his own poems.
Born in 1928, Hall grew up in Hamden, Connecticut. The Hall household was marked by a volatile father and a mother who was “steadier, maybe with more access to depths because there was less continual surface,” as Hall explained in an essay for Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series (CAAS). “To her I owe my fires, to my father my tears. I owe them both for their reading.” By age twelve, Hall had discovered the poet and short story writer Edgar Allan Poe: “I read Poe and my life changed,” he remarked in CAAS. Another strong influence in Hall’s early years was his maternal great-grandfather’s farm in New Hampshire, where he spent many summers. Decades later, he bought the same farm and settled there as a full-time writer and poet.
Hall attended Philips Exeter Academy and had his first poem published at age 16. He was a participant at the prestigious Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, where he met Robert Frost, that same year. From Exeter, Hall went to Harvard University, attending class alongside Adrienne Rich, Robert Bly, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery; he also studied for a year with Archibald MacLeish. Hall earned a BLitt from Oxford University and won the Newdigate contest for his poem “Exile,” one of the few Americans ever to win the prize. Returning to the United States, Hall spent a year at Stanford, studying under the poet-critic Yvor Winters, before returning to Harvard to join the prestigious Society of Fellows. It was there that Hall assembled Exiles and Marriages, a tightly-structured collection crafted in rigid rhyme and meter. In 1953, Hall also became the poetry editor of the Paris Review, a position he held until 1961. In 1957 he took a position as assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan, where he remained until 1975. While at Michigan, Hall met the young Jane Kenyon. They later married and, when Hall’s grandmother, who owned Eagle Pond Farm, passed away, bought the farm, left teaching, and moved there together. The collections Kicking the Leaves (1978) and The Happy Man (1986) reflect Hall’s happiness at his return to the family farm, a place rich with memories and links to his past. Many of the poems explore and celebrate the continuity between generations. The Happy Man won the Lenore Marshall/Nation Prize. Hall’s next book, The One Day (1988), won the National Book Critics Circle Award. A long poem that meditates on the on-set of old age, The One Day, like much of Hall’s early work, takes shape under formal pressure: composed of 110 stanzas, split over three sections, its final sections are written in blank verse. The critic Frederick Pollack praised the book as possibly “the last masterpiece of American Modernism. Any poet who seeks to surpass this genre should study it; any reader who has lost interest in contemporary poetry should read it.” Old and New Poems (1990) contains several traditional poems from earlier collections, as well as more innovative verses not previously published. “Baseball,” included in The Museum of Clear Ideas (1993), is the poet’s ode to the great American pastime and is structured around t
His poetry explores the longing for a more bucolic past and reflects the poet’s abiding reverence for nature. Although Hall gained early success with his first collection, Exiles and Marriages (1955), his later poetry is generally regarded as the best of his career. Often compared favorably with such writers as James Dickey, Robert Bly, and James Wright, Hall used simple, direct language to evoke surrealistic imagery. In addition to his poetry, Hall built a respected body of prose that includes essays, short fiction, plays, and children’s books. Hall, who lived on the New Hampshire farm he visited in summers as a boy, was also noted for the anthologies he has edited and is a popular teacher, speaker, and reader of his own poems.
Born in 1928, Hall grew up in Hamden, Connecticut. The Hall household was marked by a volatile father and a mother who was “steadier, maybe with more access to depths because there was less continual surface,” as Hall explained in an essay for Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series (CAAS). “To her I owe my fires, to my father my tears. I owe them both for their reading.” By age twelve, Hall had discovered the poet and short story writer Edgar Allan Poe: “I read Poe and my life changed,” he remarked in CAAS. Another strong influence in Hall’s early years was his maternal great-grandfather’s farm in New Hampshire, where he spent many summers. Decades later, he bought the same farm and settled there as a full-time writer and poet.
Hall attended Philips Exeter Academy and had his first poem published at age 16. He was a participant at the prestigious Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, where he met Robert Frost, that same year. From Exeter, Hall went to Harvard University, attending class alongside Adrienne Rich, Robert Bly, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery; he also studied for a year with Archibald MacLeish. Hall earned a BLitt from Oxford University and won the Newdigate contest for his poem “Exile,” one of the few Americans ever to win the prize. Returning to the United States, Hall spent a year at Stanford, studying under the poet-critic Yvor Winters, before returning to Harvard to join the prestigious Society of Fellows. It was there that Hall assembled Exiles and Marriages, a tightly-structured collection crafted in rigid rhyme and meter. In 1953, Hall also became the poetry editor of the Paris Review, a position he held until 1961. In 1957 he took a position as assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan, where he remained until 1975. While at Michigan, Hall met the young Jane Kenyon. They later married and, when Hall’s grandmother, who owned Eagle Pond Farm, passed away, bought the farm, left teaching, and moved there together. The collections Kicking the Leaves (1978) and The Happy Man (1986) reflect Hall’s happiness at his return to the family farm, a place rich with memories and links to his past. Many of the poems explore and celebrate the continuity between generations. The Happy Man won the Lenore Marshall/Nation Prize. Hall’s next book, The One Day (1988), won the National Book Critics Circle Award. A long poem that meditates on the on-set of old age, The One Day, like much of Hall’s early work, takes shape under formal pressure: composed of 110 stanzas, split over three sections, its final sections are written in blank verse. The critic Frederick Pollack praised the book as possibly “the last masterpiece of American Modernism. Any poet who seeks to surpass this genre should study it; any reader who has lost interest in contemporary poetry should read it.” Old and New Poems (1990) contains several traditional poems from earlier collections, as well as more innovative verses not previously published. “Baseball,” included in The Museum of Clear Ideas (1993), is the poet’s ode to the great American pastime and is structured around t
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February 23, 2021My daughter Eliza was assigned this memoir in a college class, and she loved it so much she emailed her professor to thank him for putting it on the curriculum. So of course I had to read it. Beautiful, quiet, elegiac—a portrait of a time that has gone.
August 10, 2016
When I woke every morning, I knew what the day would provide. The six days of work were followed by a Sunday when we went to church, read books, and received callers. The farm had an order to it, for the animals had to be fed and the vegetables had to be weeded and the hay had to be cut for winter. Everything done was part of a motion we didn't control but chose to implement --- a process of eating, mating, and dying. I liked the sense of necessary motion. The farm was a form: not like a set of rules on a wall, but like the symmetry of winter and summer, or like the balance of day and night over the year, June against December. My grandfather lived by the form all his life, and my summers on the farm were my glimpse of it.
Hall laments the passing of a world I could never visit again, then manages to revisit it once more through this series of essays about summers spent on his grandparent's New Hampshire farm. Old friends and loved ones long since dead spring to life to reside forever in his reminiscences. This is not my favorite of Hall's many memoirs; here he concerns himself mostly with people and incidents rather than rhapsodic descriptions of nature and the changing seasons. In all, it was a rather bittersweet read. Still . . . there's a lot to love. I particularly enjoyed the trip up a mountain to pick blueberries, and this anecdote told by his grandfather to a newlywed Hall:
At twilight after our early supper, my grandfather and I walked outside while the two women washed dishes. He had been thinking about weddings, and he told me how Washington Woodward -- in a youth I could hardly imagine -- had tied a cowbell under an aunt's bed and rung it every ten minutes during her whole wedding night.
The fact that Washington Woodward survived to adulthood makes me think that the cowbell must have been the highlight of that particular nuptial night.
Hall laments the passing of a world I could never visit again, then manages to revisit it once more through this series of essays about summers spent on his grandparent's New Hampshire farm. Old friends and loved ones long since dead spring to life to reside forever in his reminiscences. This is not my favorite of Hall's many memoirs; here he concerns himself mostly with people and incidents rather than rhapsodic descriptions of nature and the changing seasons. In all, it was a rather bittersweet read. Still . . . there's a lot to love. I particularly enjoyed the trip up a mountain to pick blueberries, and this anecdote told by his grandfather to a newlywed Hall:
At twilight after our early supper, my grandfather and I walked outside while the two women washed dishes. He had been thinking about weddings, and he told me how Washington Woodward -- in a youth I could hardly imagine -- had tied a cowbell under an aunt's bed and rung it every ten minutes during her whole wedding night.
The fact that Washington Woodward survived to adulthood makes me think that the cowbell must have been the highlight of that particular nuptial night.
April 13, 2021
Donald Hall was, along with Robert Frost, one of the literary giants of New Hampshire. He wrote poetry, plays, essays, children’s stories, criticism…you name it. Raised with that infamous New England work ethic, he continued working right until he died, in the home built by his great-grandfather in the 1800s. It was this farm that is the focus of this book, the land where he spent his childhood summers helping his grandparents with the daily farmwork while learning to hone his craft as a writer.
He was giving his life to me, handing me a baton in a race, and I took his anecdotes as a loving entertainment, when all of them, even the silliest, were matters of life and death.
(The house at Eagle Pond Farm)
My mother instilled New Hampshire in me. I was created to love New Hampshire.
Donald Hall was not a New Hampshire native. His parents lived and worked in Connecticut during the Great Depression, running a dairy. They sent their little boy up to see the grandparents every summer, so he could learn “good work” and understand the connections that aligned one generation to the next. The older folks still used horses and carts to get around and to do the haying. The boy would work alongside his grandfather during the day, six days a week, getting the animals fed and the fields cleared and the cows milked. In turn, his grandfather would tell him all about the locals, neighbors who also had long generational lifelines, neighbors who would be at church and at the yearly Old Home Week. During this event, people would return to the old towns and farms to celebrate their heritage and to meet up with the grandparents and great-grandparents who still remained. It was a time of ice-cold vanilla ice cream cones selling for five cents and reminiscences of quieter times. It was a time for the old to remember with the old. Hands were shaken at the end with a firmness that feared that these hands would never shake again.
(The barn at Eagle Pond Farm)
Each chapter focuses on different recollections. One of the best is when the young Donald Hall accompanies his grandfather on an all-day walk to find blueberries. Thirst soon slows them down and the boy quickly understands how much he admires his elderly relative, who had managed to make do without many of the modern conveniences of the rapidly changing United States. Another chapter leads into a story about the death of a neighbor, which brings the return of the deceased owner’s daughter. She had left to be a teacher but always wanted to return to her family’s farm to ensure it continued. However, she discovers her brother doesn’t want to continue farming and will turn the homestead into a motel. Clinging to the past as a conduit to her future, she won’t accept the loss of the land. One day, she simply sent every relative away on errands, locked herself in the house, and burned it to the ground. She had yearned for a future to cancel her present life, a lesson that the young Donald took to heart.
To be without a history is like being forgotten.
Eventually, his grandfather died and with his death came the end of the daily farming. For Donald Hall, the past of his childhood had always meant his eventual return to the home of his beloved grandparents. He made the return in the 1970s, leaving behind a life of tenured university work to begin a life of freelance writing. He would remain there until his death in 2018. When an auction house announced the selling of Hall’s goods and of the land itself, a non-profit foundation quickly became involved and bought the house and the barn and the fields where the cows used to roam. Donald Hall wrote, I suspect that the only present we can really live in – the only enduring present – is one that makes connections: horizontally to other people living now elsewhere under other circumstances; vertically down to the dead and up to the unborn, down to history and up with endeavor.
I truly enjoyed reading this recollection of a time passed. It reminded me of one of my other favorite books, Clabbered Dirt, Sweet Grass , another book about generational farming. Hall’s writing is simple, yet elegiac. His remembrances of his grandparents and how they talked, worked, and kept their home going even during harsh winters and hot summers, struck me none too lightly. His appreciation of finding the beauty in everything, the cows he had named as a child, his understanding of the fleetingness of life…it all comes together wonderfully. We appear on earth. We find work that makes us productive. We die. People forget our names. Descendants forget their origins. Yet, there is a braid.
Book Season = Summer (permanent mountain)
He was giving his life to me, handing me a baton in a race, and I took his anecdotes as a loving entertainment, when all of them, even the silliest, were matters of life and death.
(The house at Eagle Pond Farm)
My mother instilled New Hampshire in me. I was created to love New Hampshire.
Donald Hall was not a New Hampshire native. His parents lived and worked in Connecticut during the Great Depression, running a dairy. They sent their little boy up to see the grandparents every summer, so he could learn “good work” and understand the connections that aligned one generation to the next. The older folks still used horses and carts to get around and to do the haying. The boy would work alongside his grandfather during the day, six days a week, getting the animals fed and the fields cleared and the cows milked. In turn, his grandfather would tell him all about the locals, neighbors who also had long generational lifelines, neighbors who would be at church and at the yearly Old Home Week. During this event, people would return to the old towns and farms to celebrate their heritage and to meet up with the grandparents and great-grandparents who still remained. It was a time of ice-cold vanilla ice cream cones selling for five cents and reminiscences of quieter times. It was a time for the old to remember with the old. Hands were shaken at the end with a firmness that feared that these hands would never shake again.
(The barn at Eagle Pond Farm)
Each chapter focuses on different recollections. One of the best is when the young Donald Hall accompanies his grandfather on an all-day walk to find blueberries. Thirst soon slows them down and the boy quickly understands how much he admires his elderly relative, who had managed to make do without many of the modern conveniences of the rapidly changing United States. Another chapter leads into a story about the death of a neighbor, which brings the return of the deceased owner’s daughter. She had left to be a teacher but always wanted to return to her family’s farm to ensure it continued. However, she discovers her brother doesn’t want to continue farming and will turn the homestead into a motel. Clinging to the past as a conduit to her future, she won’t accept the loss of the land. One day, she simply sent every relative away on errands, locked herself in the house, and burned it to the ground. She had yearned for a future to cancel her present life, a lesson that the young Donald took to heart.
To be without a history is like being forgotten.
Eventually, his grandfather died and with his death came the end of the daily farming. For Donald Hall, the past of his childhood had always meant his eventual return to the home of his beloved grandparents. He made the return in the 1970s, leaving behind a life of tenured university work to begin a life of freelance writing. He would remain there until his death in 2018. When an auction house announced the selling of Hall’s goods and of the land itself, a non-profit foundation quickly became involved and bought the house and the barn and the fields where the cows used to roam. Donald Hall wrote, I suspect that the only present we can really live in – the only enduring present – is one that makes connections: horizontally to other people living now elsewhere under other circumstances; vertically down to the dead and up to the unborn, down to history and up with endeavor.
I truly enjoyed reading this recollection of a time passed. It reminded me of one of my other favorite books, Clabbered Dirt, Sweet Grass , another book about generational farming. Hall’s writing is simple, yet elegiac. His remembrances of his grandparents and how they talked, worked, and kept their home going even during harsh winters and hot summers, struck me none too lightly. His appreciation of finding the beauty in everything, the cows he had named as a child, his understanding of the fleetingness of life…it all comes together wonderfully. We appear on earth. We find work that makes us productive. We die. People forget our names. Descendants forget their origins. Yet, there is a braid.
Book Season = Summer (permanent mountain)
May 10, 2017
Whose woods these are I think I know. Hall does for New Hampshire what Robert Frost did for Vermont, Faulkner did for Mississippi and Strout continues to do for Maine. He creates a deeply felt sense of place animated by remembrances of times past. The characters of this book emerge chiefly from Hall's family and neighbors at his farm between Eagle Pond and Ragged Mountain. These people rise up and stand tall as they work stoically upon the farm during the summers when he visited New Hampshire in his childhood, youth, college life and married life. Hall's chapter on Blueberry Picking is one for the ages as are his descriptions of haying and chasing wild heifers. Having now read nearly a half dozen of Hall's memorable books, I lean most favorably to those elegies of New Hampshire living focused upon Eagle Pond and his poetry. Hall will be well remembered in his stature for his poetic and prose sensibilities as the Robert Frost of our generation.
March 13, 2007
some books, like this one, are like drinking cool water from a well, or like standing in a clover meadow on a warm spring day.
February 12, 2012
As I have written elsewhere, this is the book that started my ongoing love for both Holderness School and for Donald Hall. Assigned as the 'all-school read', it set the tone, mood, ethos,and sense of place for John as he entered, as a ninth grader, a small New Hampshire boarding school. I read it, too, and, profoundly moved by its simple, spare, and authentic voice, I decided then and there that any school that would choose such a dear and wondrous book was a school that was good enough for our child. Three graduates and almost twenty-five years later, we still feel the same.
I treasure this book, and all its attendant memories, so highly that those same three graduates commissioned a portrait of its cover for my birthday last year. That's the truth.
I treasure this book, and all its attendant memories, so highly that those same three graduates commissioned a portrait of its cover for my birthday last year. That's the truth.
March 25, 2019
Really enjoyed. Will leave Donald Hall for awhile, but definitely will return to read his other books. He paints pictures of New Hampshire will his words.
November 6, 2021
The title comes from a box discovered by the author while he was clearing the attic of his grandparent's New England farm house. The box was full of tiny pieces of string and was labeled "String too short to be saved."
That example of austerity and frugality,is found throughout this collection of stories that recall the author's summers on his grandparent's farm in the 1930s and 1940s. The stories also reflect the rural New England work ethic, self reliance, and taking care of family and neighbors. But they are not tomes, they are fun stories that simply reflect those values. One story is about the young boy hiking a long ways to go up a steep mountain with his grandfather to pick wild blueberries and the exhausting trek down while carrying the heavy load. The boy describes his thirst after his water was gone and the sheer joy of drinking from a tucked away spring on the way down. During the hike the grandfather recalls stories of the mountain and its people and the author's way of incorporating them makes the reader feel as if they were on the hike listening to the grandfather reminisce. Each story is connected to the others and they all use that device.
This memoir was published in 1960 and includes stories that were written and published before that. What helps make this memoir work is that the author keeps the focus on the New England past, it was only in the epilogue and a subsequent google search that I learned of Donald Hall's education and success as a professor, poet and writer
That example of austerity and frugality,is found throughout this collection of stories that recall the author's summers on his grandparent's farm in the 1930s and 1940s. The stories also reflect the rural New England work ethic, self reliance, and taking care of family and neighbors. But they are not tomes, they are fun stories that simply reflect those values. One story is about the young boy hiking a long ways to go up a steep mountain with his grandfather to pick wild blueberries and the exhausting trek down while carrying the heavy load. The boy describes his thirst after his water was gone and the sheer joy of drinking from a tucked away spring on the way down. During the hike the grandfather recalls stories of the mountain and its people and the author's way of incorporating them makes the reader feel as if they were on the hike listening to the grandfather reminisce. Each story is connected to the others and they all use that device.
This memoir was published in 1960 and includes stories that were written and published before that. What helps make this memoir work is that the author keeps the focus on the New England past, it was only in the epilogue and a subsequent google search that I learned of Donald Hall's education and success as a professor, poet and writer
July 13, 2023
This is a very special book. I first heard it mentioned in one of Wendell Berry’s books. It’s a collection of stories about a boy’s summers spent on his grandparents’ farm in rural New Hampshire.
May 18, 2018
Because we have a wonderful little "second home" in Grafton, Vermont, I have been devouring everything I get my hands on about New England and its early settlers. But, for some reason, I had missed this book by the poet Donald Hall. I guess I thought it was poetry - and avoided it - even though Hall was named Poet Laureate of the U. S. in June of 2006.
Thank goodness, one of our lovely and literate neighbors, Sandra, just up Main Street here in Grafton, gave it to me. I loved this book.
Published originally in 1961, the present edition includes an epilogue by Hall and a collection of pictures about the characters in the book. And what a wonderful bunch of characters they are - lovingly remembered for their constancies and their idiosyncrancancies.
This is a lovely book of memories, mostly about growing up with his grandfather on the farm in rural upstate New Hampshire where Hall now lives. But it is also sheer poetry, in its best sense:
"I understood that my grief, which I still carried like comfort, was not for my grandfather. It was not my death that I saw in it....On the farm I felt myself protected by the old in a gallery of the dead. They sang that I was their own, and by answering them with elegies for the rural past I evaded the real taste of my discontent."
Thank goodness, one of our lovely and literate neighbors, Sandra, just up Main Street here in Grafton, gave it to me. I loved this book.
Published originally in 1961, the present edition includes an epilogue by Hall and a collection of pictures about the characters in the book. And what a wonderful bunch of characters they are - lovingly remembered for their constancies and their idiosyncrancancies.
This is a lovely book of memories, mostly about growing up with his grandfather on the farm in rural upstate New Hampshire where Hall now lives. But it is also sheer poetry, in its best sense:
"I understood that my grief, which I still carried like comfort, was not for my grandfather. It was not my death that I saw in it....On the farm I felt myself protected by the old in a gallery of the dead. They sang that I was their own, and by answering them with elegies for the rural past I evaded the real taste of my discontent."
July 1, 2018
This is short but powerful book about Donald Hall's formative summers in Wilmot, New Hampshire as he was growing up. The former poet laureate was buried yesterday here in New Hampshire. I read this to honor him and his gift of putting into words those images and feelings that give meaning to our worlds. I ask you to slow down, read this book, and enjoy the family around you. They do not stay for ever, but they have much to share and give. Tell those stories, revel in the mundane, for it will change all too quickly.
February 21, 2010
THE quintessential book for life in New Hampshire in the early 20th century, and by extension The Woods all the way from Maine to the Adirondacks. The odd characters, the work ethic, self-sufficiency, wildlife, empty cellar holes, and stone walls that run now straight through climax forest.
January 2, 2022
One of my favorite books of all time.
November 30, 2023
An excellent companion to Northern Borders.
June 19, 2023
“I tried to set in order the box of string too short to be saved, which I had kept as a miser keeps gold.”
In the New Times a few years ago, I read a piece written by Donald Hall. He was in his 80s at that time, and he wrote about living in his grandparents’ old farmhouse in New Hampshire, alone after his wife had died. He wrote about loneliness and isolation. It was a beautiful, elegiac essay, and after seeing that this book String too Short to be Saved, was on James Mustich’s list, I was eager to read it.
This is a series of vignettes of Hall’s time spent on his grandparents farm in New Hampshire in the 1930s and 40s. It is a nostalgic evocation of a way of life that was already disappearing at that time. Very beautiful prose.
In the New Times a few years ago, I read a piece written by Donald Hall. He was in his 80s at that time, and he wrote about living in his grandparents’ old farmhouse in New Hampshire, alone after his wife had died. He wrote about loneliness and isolation. It was a beautiful, elegiac essay, and after seeing that this book String too Short to be Saved, was on James Mustich’s list, I was eager to read it.
This is a series of vignettes of Hall’s time spent on his grandparents farm in New Hampshire in the 1930s and 40s. It is a nostalgic evocation of a way of life that was already disappearing at that time. Very beautiful prose.
March 30, 2025
This is one of my husband's favorite books. It's been in his bookcase ever since I met him . . . and only now have I read it in its entirety.
Poet and memoirist Donald Hall writes evocatively and lovingly about the summers he spent on his grandparents' farm in New Hampshire. Each chapter can stand alone; collectively they show the progression as Hall grows up and his grandparents grow older. The 1979 edition includes a coda that tells what happened next -- Hall and his wife Jane Kenyon moved to the farm in 1975 after his grandmother passed away (at 96) and lived there the rest of their lives. (Kenyon died in 1995 and Hall died in 2018.)
[The farmhouse is now a historic property with a nonprofit board restoring and maintaining it.]
Poet and memoirist Donald Hall writes evocatively and lovingly about the summers he spent on his grandparents' farm in New Hampshire. Each chapter can stand alone; collectively they show the progression as Hall grows up and his grandparents grow older. The 1979 edition includes a coda that tells what happened next -- Hall and his wife Jane Kenyon moved to the farm in 1975 after his grandmother passed away (at 96) and lived there the rest of their lives. (Kenyon died in 1995 and Hall died in 2018.)
[The farmhouse is now a historic property with a nonprofit board restoring and maintaining it.]
August 26, 2019
Donal Hall is a poet and scholar: he certainly brings that color to this memoir. Many descriptive passages and beautifully woven vignettes of scenes I instinctively recognize, although set in the completely foreign mountains of New England.
On its own, the book is lovely and sad, and meaningful to anyone who possesses a reverent sensibility of the past. For me, it was hugely profound in providing glimpses of all I am trying to preserve in my own home life and ways of farming. It reveals the deep, abiding philosophy behind good stewardship and how timeless and careful that philosophy must be.
On its own, the book is lovely and sad, and meaningful to anyone who possesses a reverent sensibility of the past. For me, it was hugely profound in providing glimpses of all I am trying to preserve in my own home life and ways of farming. It reveals the deep, abiding philosophy behind good stewardship and how timeless and careful that philosophy must be.
August 25, 2020
Loads of nostalgia, as the author chronicles his boyhood summers spent on his grandparents' subsistence farm in New Hampshire. A plain, simple life of hard work, good food, and plenty of time to read and write. Most of the people in the rural area are elderly. Young Donald really has no playmates, but is happy to spend his time with his loving grandparents, especially his grandfather. There is hand milking of cows, baby chicks to tend, eggs to gather, blueberries to be picked, and fields full of hay to be mowed, raked and put up, before the days of mechanization and balers. It is truly a one-horse operation.
October 10, 2018
This book was sort of an adult Little House on the Prairie set in New England type of memoir. Nothing very momentous happens. Each chapter could be read independently. In fact, at the end of the book you discover that many of the chapters were published as articles in the New Yorker. Topics include a typical summer day on a New England farm in 1942, a chapter about a local character, a chapter about blueberry picking with his grandfather, and so forth. I found it to be both escapist and absorbing.
December 31, 2022
Never read a book of childhood memories written by someone apparently fixated on the idea of inevitable death. I enjoyed bits of this book. I think I would have liked the author's grandparents. But the whole thing was overlaid with a sense of futility emitting from the author. Two pages from the end of the telling, we get, "Nostalgia was self hatred." No it's not. Nostalgia can be very uplifting. Now, if you just dwell on the negative--that's verging on self hatred. I go now to seek a happier book of recollections.
June 15, 2019
And in the same vein as "Haying Time," (and gifted to me by Holly, actually), Donald Hall's exquisitely written memoir of his summers on his grandparents' farm in New Hampshire in the 1930's and 40's. His love for the place, the people, the life. And in the Epilogue, his return to live there with his wife (my most beloved poet) Jane Kenyon. He died there, an old man, in June of last year. (She pre-deceased him by many years.). Just lovely.
October 27, 2019
This is an excellent book of reminiscing of a time gone by Hall remembers his grandfathers farm in New Hampshire and it could have easily been me and my grandfather in West Virginia. Maybe all we can do today is remember when since there are few places of this type left. I liked it, but I doubt the under 50 group would like it.
March 23, 2021
This is a quiet book, filled with recollections and observations of a grandson's summers with his grandparents. Particularly, with his grandfather--and the stories his grandfather told him as they went about their work. The author's love for place and people and memory shines through, and his voice is more evocative for his use of brevity.
April 13, 2022
I'm not sure where/how I came across this book. But a paperback copy was on my bookshelf and I picked it up. So glad I did. It's a beautifully written memoir of sorts. The title grabbed me and I thought it would be funny and glib. Anything but. Deep thoughts about life that came just at the right time. I highly recommend.
June 1, 2023
OMG!! What a find!! A real gem tucked away in the library. Such a touching, evocative story made up of a collection of tales that nearly brought a tear to my eye. Really captured a setting in New Hampshire during the mid-20th Century. This is a story along the lines of "A River Runs Through It". Highly recommend this short but very good read.
September 24, 2023
The poet Donald Hall writes about the summers of his youth, spent on his grandparents' farm in rural New Hampshire. His memories are full of love and nostalgia, love for his grandparents and the life they lead, and nostalgia for all that has already faded from the landscape. I have my own precious store of memories of time spent on my grandparents' Maine farm so this really resonated for me.
November 18, 2016
"A man was cleaning the attic of an old house in New England and he found a box which was full of tiny pieces of string. On the lid of the box there was an inscription in an old hand: 'String too short to be saved.'"
September 1, 2018
I love the way Donald Hall wrote, especially when he is describing his grandparents farm & their rural way of life. Hate that he has passed away but happy that he got to die in the farmhouse he loved.
February 26, 2019
Truly a wonderful book - a collection of eleven stories that constitute a memoir that progressively tell a single story.
Donald Hall is an astonishing writer. This is about family, about the importance of place, about change. Remarkable.
Donald Hall is an astonishing writer. This is about family, about the importance of place, about change. Remarkable.
October 13, 2019
Better than I expected. As a poet, Hall has a knowing way of using his words. As a storyteller, he has an engaging way of using his words. As a writer, he can draw deeper meaning from his memories.
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