A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety...it’s a freewheeling essay collection that’s a fitting coda to a distinguished career ... Much in this collection is familiar, including stories about his grandparents’ 1803 New Hampshire house at Eagle Pond Farm, owned by his family since 1865 ... Hall, who spent decades exploring the poetry of death, was sanguine about mortality. In A Carnival of Losses, he considered life’s roller coaster between desolation and joy ... Hall may have reached his roundhouse but not before bequeathing readers with this moving valedictory gift.

Most of his reflections here are blithely inconsequential, keen observations about nature, career and relationships. They expound no end-of-life wisdom, detail no significant literary trends or feuds and offer no general assessment of the state of poetry today. But it is this very lack of utility—the knowledge that we need not underline or take notes—that makes the book such a joy to read. This is not to suggest that the book lacks weight. Whether Hall is describing the passage of the seasons or mulling over the comforts of friendship, he is always worth hearing out. He is especially moving when writing about his love affair and home life with his second wife, Jane Kenyon, a respected poet in her own right ... This collection of well-crafted bric-a-brac demonstrates that he’s still not inclined to let any of his words go to waste.

A few years ago, Donald Hall wrote a book called Essays After Eighty ... His follow-up collection...comes just weeks after his death at 89 and roughly three months shy of his 90th birthday. And it's a beauty, brimming with stories, confessions and faded snapshots in time in which he muses about life, settles a few scores and brags a little about his accomplishments ... Fellow writers will enjoy his observations about writing, including more than a dozen short profiles of poets he’s known and admired—or not ... It’s odd that a book whose subject is loss could be so uplifting. And yet it is. Hall may be telling us what it’s like to fall apart, but he does it so calmly, and with such wit and exactitude, that you can’t help but shake your head in wonder.

Over recent years Hall explains that poems stopped coming to him, but that 'prose endures,' and in these two hundred and some pages of mostly short and spiky items, he assesses his current situation ... a pervasive wit gives pressure to these opinions and reminiscences ... When Hall began to publish poems, roughly sixty-five years ago, anything like wit was notably absent ... Decades later, after the death of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, he was able to write in a rather different spirit ... its presence in Hall’s late poems, and now in his prose, has given continuing life to the aging writer’s performance ... But the book does not end on that ultimate note of loss; rather there is a touching move back toward the living.

While the subject of death preoccupied much of his later work, Hall’s sense of humor also came prominently to the fore ... From this patchwork of shards and vignettes, most only a page or two apiece, emerges the image of a singular rebel, a literary icon ... Much of the book has a breezy, meandering quality, as Hall roams through his vast personal and poetic archive ... The result is a gathering of meticulous, if at times indecorous, prose on topics large and small, funny, sad, outspoken — a liberating last hurrah.

...in the section 'The Selected Poets of Donald Hall,' to which poetry lovers may turn first and be delightfully surprised to discover they’re more gossip than critique. There is much more about poetry, of course, most notably the longest entry, 'Necropoetics,' about elegies and other poems of death, ending with his for his wife, the late Jane Kenyon. Another longer piece may be the best: 'Walking to Portsmouth' tells the story behind Hall’s Caldecott Medalist children’s book, The Ox-Cart Man (1979). But they’re all good.

They’re up there with the best things he did ... These books have flat-footed gravitas, a vestigial sort of swat that calls to mind Johnny Cash’s stark final records with the producer Rick Rubin ... Which isn’t to say they are not also full of guff. About a third of A Carnival of Losses is threadbare and meandering, memories of dead relatives and journeys abroad and anthologies past. But the other two-thirds are good enough to make clear that Hall did not live past his sell-by date as a writer ... Hall does not, in A Carnival of Losses, wield much of a cleaver. He does not clamor for the last word in old disputes.

Former U.S. poet laureate (2006–2007), Hall reflects on aging and death in this candid and often humorous memoir. Hall meanders over mundane losses in his life—the demise of mill towns, the root cellar in his New Hampshire home—as well as the death of his wife, poet Jane Kenyon, 20 years ago, and the poets he has known ... Hall’s ruminative and detailed reflections on life make this a fantastic follow-up to his Essays After Eighty.

A joyful, wistful celebration of poetry, poets, and a poet’s life ... Personal matters that former poet laureate Hall wrote about in Essays After Eighty (2014, etc.) pop up again, this time with a greater sense of urgency ... There’s much to enjoy in these exuberant 'notes.'

The subject of death preoccupied much of Hall’s later work, Hall’s sense of humor also came prominently to the fore. Several years ago, Hall (mistakenly) thought he was dying, and announced his imminent death to anyone who called. When he managed to survive his sundry ailments, he turned the scenario into an occasion for self-mockery … This blend of melodrama, comedy, and despair offers a fitting preview of his new memoir, A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety. In these essays, Hall laments the insults of old age and exploits their humor. He ruminates, tells stories, relates family history, and circles back to the great love and loss of his life, the late poet Jane Kenyon, his wife of two decades … Much of the book has a breezy, meandering quality, as Hall roams through his vast personal and poetic archive … As a collection, this book consists largely of episodes and oddments — the ‘notes’ of the book’s subtitle. Yet as we learn, Hall’s notes are not just impromptu musings; his work famously went through dozens of drafts and revisions. The result is a gathering of meticulous, if at times indecorous, prose on topics large and small, funny, sad, outspoken — a liberating last hurrah.

The proposition that there is nothing wrong with writing about one's own life underlies A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety, which continues the musings begun in Essays After Eighty and 17 previous works of prose: more on the writing life; more on Hall's marriage to and early loss of his wife, poet Jane Kenyon; more on Eagle Pond Farm, the New Hampshire property where his family has lived since the Civil War; more on medical matters and mortality; more on the poet's famously immoderate beard … While some memoirs succeed on the basis of the stunning story they tell…Hall's delightful persona on the page; his crystalline, rhythmically precise sentences; his dry wit and his humility about his own achievements guarantee that we will happily spend this final afternoon in his company.