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HERE AT EAGLE POND by Donald Hall

HERE AT EAGLE POND

By

Pub Date: Nov. 12th, 1990
Publisher: Ticknor & Fields/Houghton Mifflin

Further tender reflections on New Hampshire from poet and essayist Hall (Seasons at Eagle Pond, 1987, etc.). Many of these 22 pieces appeared first in The Boston Globe, Harper's, New England Monthly, and other periodicals. Eagle Pond Farm, as readers of Hall's previous book know, is the New Hampshire family homestead where the author spent much of his childhood and where he and his wife now live year-round. ""We live where we live,"" he says, ""for landscape and seasons, for the place of it, but also for the time of it""--and for the solitude, the annual church fair, the country store, all the tackings of rural life. In a gentle, sometimes bemused voice, Hall celebrates his rambling old farmhouse, his ancestors, his Yankee neighbors. He pokes around the ""back chamber""--a storage room laden with over a century's worth of bric-a-brac. He goes surveying. He listens to the Red Sox. Sometimes he's funny, as when he lists his ""Reasons for Hating Vermont"" (""in Vermont deer are required to have shots. . .in Vermont you can buy boots precaked with odorless manure""), an arch, backhanded way of saluting his beloved New Hampshire, ""inhabited by real people who drive pickup trucks."" Hall closes with 50 fictitious New Hampshire voices saying New Hampshire kinds of things: ""You want zoning you go to Russia, back to Russia."" ""Vermont has become the generic name for any place north of Boston, unless it's got lobsters,"" complains Hall This lovely book--as fine as its predecessor, and enhanced by Thomas W. Nason's strong b&w illustrations--will, one hopes, change all that. New Hampshire has found its champion.