Breakfast Served Any Time All Day: Essays on Poetry New and Selected Book

". . . 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"No contemporary can match T.S. Eliot as a triple threat-a major poet, important critic and key editor. But Donald Hall comes close."-Book WorldForty years of writings on poetry in one essential volume by this master of American letters.Hall's essays concentrate on the sensuality of poems, lavish bodies of language created by the senses for the spirit by way of the senses. These essays understand poetry as one inside talking to another inside through the medium of sound. We read poems best-Hall says-not with our eyes or ears but with our mouths.The emphasis lies not on poetry's ostensible content, but on its pleasures, less on ideas and more on vowels and the dance of rhythm. In short, it is a corrective to readings of poetry that emphasize only what is paraphraseable."Reading with care, so that a wholeness of language engages a wholeness of reading body and reading mind, we absorb poetry not with our eyes only nor with our ears. We read with our mouths that cherish vowel and consonant; we read with our limbed muscles that enact the dance of the poetry's rhythm; we read alert to the history and context of words. . . ." (From the chapter "The Unsayable Said")Read More