The Back Chamber

The former U.S. poet laureate reaches his 20th book in unmistakably honest form, aggressively plain and unfailingly open about sex, old age, suicide, recovery, the friendship of poets, the business of poetry, dogs, New Hampshire, and baseball. Some of Hall's best-known books mourn his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, whose absence grieves him here again. More prominent, though, are the poems about sex%E2%80%94some erotic, some comic, all frank, and intent on the ironies that attend lust in old age. A long and underwhelming narrative poem, "Ric's Progress," occupies the middle of the volume; Hall follows the courtship, marriage, and adulteries of a predictable, slightly Updikeish everyman, leavening his errant ways with grim wisdom%E2%80%94"we divorce for the same reasons that we marry,/ and we seduce the executioner when we desire/ to be hanged." More vivid and durable are the short poems about old age, old friends, sad memories, and younger versions of Hall himself. "Meatloaf" finds Hall "counting nine syllables on fingers/ discolored by old age and felt pens"; "Closing" remembers the poet and critic Liam Rector, while "The Offspring" imagines the grief of "an adolescent who was not here," the child that Hall and Kenyon could not have. (Sept.)