Holding his ground

IN book after book, Donald Hall implores us to be still, to be silent, to listen. To the uppity commuter, to the restless seeker, he says: “Travel can be a burden, and who wants to leave Eagle Pond anyway?” “Eagle Pond” (Mariner Books: 256 pp., $14.95 paper) gathers his prose about his family’s ancestral New Hampshire farmhouse as well as the majestic poem “Daylilies on the Hill, 1975-1989” in which Hall’s daily walk becomes a journey into family history and a consideration of his role as storykeeper: “Stories continue as the earth / continues. And the best way to preserve topsoil, as the man said, / is to pave it over: Do I pave it over by writing it down? / Do I glass it in?”

I wonder what the affluent class would make of all this, of his homely resistance to trading up: It’s such a common aspiration to shed one house for another that Hall’s pride in his family’s homestead feels alien. But this strangeness may explain why reading him is so exhilarating for urbanized minds. He argues for being stationary; he shrugs off the idea that repetition is somehow bad (if seasons repeat, why can’t we?); vegetable and animal life overlap and share qualities, so that people are “tubers” holed up against winter or asparagus plants raise “knuckled fingers.”

Hall makes you look around your own world with fresh vision -- and envy his. Summer brings hot muggy skies to Los Angeles, but for Hall, the season arrives, on June 22, “early in the spirit-light of three-forty-five or so. When we are lucky the whippoorwill wakes us with his three syllables as brilliant as crystal.... The insistent triad continues for twenty minutes ... and sets slugabeds cursing on every dirt road in New Hampshire. But if late sleepers erupt from their beds with mayhem on their minds, they are out of luck: The whippoorwill is elusive and we seldom catch glimpse of it. Brown, unpretty, it soars away to doze in its ground nest through sunlit hours.”

-- Nick Owchar