"Romanian Furrow", written in 1933, is an enchanting and evocative chronicle of a journey made by a young Englishman, Donald Hall, to Romania in search of a rural lifestyle that was rapidly disappearing in Western Europe. Hall set out not only to observe but to actively participate in peasant life and in this quest he brilliantly succeeded in touching the soul of Romanian country life. The friendships he made along the way are most moving. Hall's account of rural life in Romania - which has not markedly changed today - admirably meets the reading requirements of Green or Eco tourists, a market segment that Romania is investing much of its tourism budget to attract.

One of the most admired American poets of his generation, James Wright (1927-80) wrote contemplative, sturdy, and generous poems with an honesty, clarity, and stylistic range matched by very few--then or now. From his Deep Image-inspired lyrics to his Whtimanesque renderings of Neruda, Vallejo, and other Latin American poets, and from his heartfelt reflections on life, love, and loss in his native Ohio to the celebrated prose poems (set frequently in Italy) that marked the end of his important career, Above the River gathers the complete work of a modern master. It also features a moving and insightful introduction by Donald Hall, Wright's longtime friend and colleague.

The Routledge Queer Studies Reader provides a comprehensive resource and textbook for students and scholars working in this vibrant and interdisciplinary field. The volume traces the emergence and development of Queer Studies, presenting reproductions of the key critical essays crucial for any study, alongside more recent essays, exploring exciting new directions. Each section is individually edited and introduced by a prominent scholar, contextualizing the work within its historical, disciplinary and theoretical boundaries. Section subject areas include 'Genealogies', 'Sex', 'Temporalities', 'Kinship', 'Affect', 'Bodies and Borders'. The book is edited by two of the leading scholars in the field and features valuable pedagogical tools, including discussion questions, an annotated bibliography and a glossary. The Routledge Queer Studies Reader is a field-defining volume and presents an illuminating guide for established scholars and also those new to Queer Studies.

Explores the history of theories of selfhood, from the Classical era to the present, and demonstrates how those theories can be applied in literary and cultural criticism. Donald E. Hall:

* examines all of the major methodologies and theoretical emphases of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including psychoanalytic criticism, materialism, feminism and queer theory
* applies the theories discussed in detailed readings of literary and cultural texts, from novels and poetry to film and the visual arts
* offers a unique perspective on our current obsession with perfecting our selves
* looks to the future of selfhood given the new identity possibilities arising out of developing technologies.

Examining some of the most exciting issues confronting cultural critics and readers today, Subjectivity is the essential introduction to a fraught but crucial critical term and a challenge to the way we define our selves.

Share an old-fashioned New England Christmas with your children—back to a time when making the presents was far more satisfying than buying them. Lucy Wells likes planning ahead. In her quaint New England town the leaves have just begun to change, but Lucy is already thinking of Christmas. She begins to make presents for her family: a pincushion for her mother, a doll for her sister, and a pen-wiper for her best friend. For the whole family, her parents have ordered a new modern range stove. The days grow colder and shorter, the snow grows deeper, and everyone grows more excited. Finally, the day arrives Lucy and her family travel to the South Danbury Church on Christmas to exchange gifts, sing carols with the whole town, and perform in the Christmas pageant. Poet laureate Donald Hall (author of The Ox-Cart Man and the companion to this book, Lucy’s Summer) grew up spending as much time as he could on his grandfather’s farm in rural New Hampshire. It was there he milked cows, raised sheep, and heard stories about Christmases past that are brought to life in this read-aloud picture book for young children.

Now nearing ninety, Hall delivers a new collection of self-knowing, fierce, and funny essays on aging, the pleasures of solitude, and the sometimes astonishing freedoms arising from both. He intersperses memories of exuberant days - as in Paris, 1951, with a French girl memorably inclined to say, "I couldn't care less" - with writing, visceral and hilarious, on what he has called the "unknown, unanticipated galaxy" of extreme old age. "Why should a nonagenarian hold anything back?" Hall answers his own question by revealing several vivid instances of "the worst thing I ever did,' and through equally uncensored tales of literary friendships spanning decades, with James Wright, Richard Wilbur, Seamus Heaney, and other luminaries. Cementing his place alongside Roger Angell and Joan Didion as a generous and profound chronicler of loss, Hall returns to the death of his beloved wife, Jane Kenyon, in an essay as original and searing as anything he's written in his extraordinary literary lifetime.

Describes the day-to-day life of an early nineteenth-century New England family throughout the changing seasons.

Explores the history of theories of selfhood, from the Classical era to the present, and demonstrates how those theories can be applied in literary and cultural criticism. Donald E. Hall:

* examines all of the major methodologies and theoretical emphases of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including psychoanalytic criticism, materialism, feminism and queer theory
* applies the theories discussed in detailed readings of literary and cultural texts, from novels and poetry to film and the visual arts
* offers a unique perspective on our current obsession with perfecting our selves
* looks to the future of selfhood given the new identity possibilities arising out of developing technologies.

Examining some of the most exciting issues confronting cultural critics and readers today, Subjectivity is the essential introduction to a fraught but crucial critical term and a challenge to the way we define our selves.

Former poet laureate Donald Hall selects his essential work from a moving and brilliant life in poetry. &#8220When I was twelve I wrote my first poem, and by fourteen I decided that's what I'd do my whole life. I don't regret it." -- from the afterword by Donald Hall Donald Hall was an American master, one of the nation's most beloved and accomplished poets. Here, having taken stock of the body of his work--rigorous, gorgeous verse that is the result of seventy years of &#8220ambition and pleasure"--he strips it down. The Selected Poems of Donald Hall reflects the poet's handpicked, concise selection, showcasing work rich with humor and Eros and &#8220a kind of simplicity that succeeds in engaging the reader in the first few lines" (Billy Collins). From the enduring &#8220My Son My Executioner" to &#8220Names of Horses" to &#8220Without," Donald Hall's best poems deliver &#8220a banquet in the mouth" (Charles Simic) and an &#8220aching elegance" (Baltimore Sun). For the first-time reader or an old friend, these are, above all others, the poems to read, reread, and remember.

"Old Poets is an indispensable jewel." -Washington Post "An astonishing array of encounters...Hall's observations are shrewd and generous." -Boston Globe Intimate portraits of great poets in old age, giving new insight into their work and their lives, and context to the often flawless art created by flawed human beings. The best of themselves endure, and the old poets' existence and endurance gives readers courage to pursue their own vision. Donald Hall (Essays After Eighty and A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety) knew a great deal about work, about poetry, and about age. Each of those things come together in this unique collection. We hear about Robert Frost as Hall knew him: vain and cruel, a man possessed by guilt. But, as Hall writes, "The poet who survives is the poet to celebrate; the human being who confronts darkness and defeats it is the one to admire. For all his vanity, Robert Frost is admirable: He looked into his desert places, confronted his desire to enter the oblivion of the snowy woods, and drove on." Hall's essays are once both intimate portraits and learned treatises. He takes us on a pub crawl through the Welsh countryside with the word-mad Dylan Thomas; to the Faber & Faber office of T. S. Eliot, who had discovered more happiness in age than in youth; to a reading where Robert Frost's public persona hid the truth; to Brooklyn for lunch with the enigmatic Marianne Moore; and to Italy and for a visit with the notorious Ezra Pound. By the time Hall met them, each poet was, he observed, "old enough to have detached from ongoing poetry, to feel alien to the ambitions of the grandchildren." Also included are portraits of the poets who taught Hall as a writer: the unfailingly kind Archibald MacLeish and Yvor Winters, from whom he learned the most about poetry. Along the way are observations about many other poets and the literary cultures that sustained them. Contents include: "Vanity, Fame, Love, and Robert Frost," "Dylan Thomas and Public Suicide," "Notes on T. S. Eliot," "Rocks and Whirlpools: Archibald MacLeish and Yvor Winters," "Marianne Moore: Valiant and Alien," and "Fragments of Ezra Pound." For lovers of literature, this is a gorgeous remembrance and likely to compel an immediate visit to the poetry section of the nearest bookstore-as Hall writes, "Their presences have been emblems in my life, and I remember these poets as if I kept them carved in stone."

The Routledge Queer Studies Reader provides a comprehensive resource for students and scholars working in this vibrant and interdisciplinary field. The book traces the emergence and development of Queer Studies as a field of scholarship, presenting key critical essays alongside more recent criticism that explores new directions. The collection is edited by leading scholars in the field and presents: individual introductory notes that situate each work within its historical, disciplinary and theoretical contexts essays grouped by key subject areas including Genealogies, Sex, Temporalities, Kinship, Affect, Bodies, and Borders writings by major figures including Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, David M. Halperin, Jose Esteban Munoz, Elizabeth Grosz, David Eng, Judith Halberstam and Sara Ahmed. The Routledge Queer Studies Reader is a field-defining volume and presents an illuminating guide for established scholars and also those new to Queer Studies.

"Breakfast Served Any Time All Day" collects forty years of writings on poetry in one essential volume by master of American letters Donald Hall.
Praise for "Breakfast Served"

." . . the essays in this book are engaging, passionate, strange, and unified. Hall has been around a long time, and you can trace the concerns of a generation through the mind of this one man: questions about the diminished scope of poetry, the diminished ambitions of poets, how a poem 'means, ' etc. . . . . Criticism . . . is an exercise in sanity, of which these essays are a splendid and useful example."
-"Poetry"
"A luminous and essential volume about the sensuality of language, its pleasures and sounds."
-"Ploughshares"
"It is in this merger of a poet's biography and a poem's body that Hall does his best work. . . . ["Breakfast Served Any Time All Day"] has an undeniably infectious quality to it. Finishing it, you cannot help but want to return to your bookshelf, and read-again or for the first time-the great forgotten poems of our past."
-Nathan Greenwood Thompson, "Rain Taxi"

In "An Unkindness of Ravens," Meg Kearney's poems weave voices of estrangement and redemption: mothers, daughters, lovers of gin and dead things. In the middle poems, the protagonist confronts "Raven": a figure of guises and disguises, revealing the speaker's fears and angst. National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet Donald Hall has written the Foreword.

Meg Kearney is the Associate Director of the National Book Foundation. She was the recipient of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and "New York Times" fellowships and received the Alice M. Sellers Academy of American Poets Prize in 1998. She lives in New York City.

Donald Hall's poignant and courageous poetry speaks of the death of the magnificent, humorous, and gifted Jane Kenyon. Hall speaks to us all of grief, as a poet lamenting the death of a poet, as a husband mourning the loss of a wife. Without is Hall's greatest and most honorable achievement-his gift and testimony, his lament and his celebration of loss and of love.

In the pantheon of great sports literature, not a few poets have tried their hand at paying tribute to their love affair with the game—Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams among them. This elegant volume collects Donald Hall’s prose about sports, concentrating on baseball but extending to basketball, football and Ping-Pong. The essays are a wonderful mixture of reminiscence and observation, of baseball and of fathers and sons, of how a game binds people together and bridges generations.

In Donald Hall's compelling new collection of essays on the state of contemporary poetry, he likens much of what passes for poetry today to the product of an assembly line -- the McPoem.  The McPoem may satisfy the desire for fame, the ambition for publication.  But real ambition for the poet, says Hall, lies in the sometimes painful, always time-consuming perfection of the poem itself.  You may not agree with Hall, but you cannot afford to ignore him.

Paola's poetry presents a series of life's bardo experiences: drug use; the refused birth of infertility; the social implications of the female body; and the afterworld of pop culture. Bardo travels to a place where to be human is to be part god/part sickness/always wondering which is which.

HERE AT EAGLE POND is Donald Hall's remarkable collection of essays about the permanent and transparent memory of place and of his coming home to Eagle Pond, New Hampshire, where he grew up and returned to live with his wife Jane Kenyon at the age of 45, where he began writing poems at the age of twelve, and where his ancestors made their livings by free-lancing as farmers. In these tender essays, Hall tells of the joys and quiddities of life in the ancestral New Hampshire place formerly worked as a dairy farm by his grandparents; of the comforts and discomforts of a world in which the year has four seasons -- maple sugar, blackfly, Red Sox, and winter. These essays are also Donald Hall's letters to friends, answers to such life-altering questions as: "What would our lives be like, living here at Eagle Pond, in solitude among relics and memories, in a countryside of birches and GMC pickups?" And they are ghost stories as well: vivid descriptions of Hall's intimate connection with the land and with his family past. Most importantly, HERE AT EAGLE POND is Donald Hall's coming home to language.

This is Hall at large, ruminating on the subjects that never fail to move him: baseball, poetry, poets, reading, the rough terrain of home. -The New YorkerA vibrant testament to the substance of a writer's experience.-The Boston Globe.

This volume contains the finest short poetry Donald Hall has written, poems of landscape and love, of dedication and prophecy, poems that have won thousands of readers, as well as various prizes and honors.