num_pages: 144
description: From a former Poet Laureate a new collection of essays delivering a gloriously unexpected view from the vantage point of very old age Donald Hall has lived a remarkable life of letters a career capped by a National Medal of the Arts awarded by the president. Now in the unknown unanticipated galaxy of very old age he is writing searching essays that startle move and delight. In the transgressive and horrifyingly funny No Smoking he looks back over his lifetime and several of his ancestors lifetimes of smoking unfiltered cigarettes packs of them every day. Hall paints his past: Decades followed each other  thirty was terrifying forty I never noticed because I was drunk fifty was best with a total change of life sixty extended the bliss of fifty . . . And poignantly often joyfully he limns his present: When I turned eighty and rubbed testosterone on my chest my beard roared like a lion and gained four inches. Most memorably Hall writes about his enduring love affair with his ancestral Eagle Pond Farm and with the writing life that sustains him every day: Yesterday my first nap was at 9:30 a.m. but when I awoke I wrote again.
language: English
title: Essays After Eighty
publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt