James Baker Hall

Composed while Wendell Berry looked out the multipaned window of his writing studio, this early sequence of poems contemplates Berry's personal life as much as it ponders the seasons he witnessed through the window. First designed and printed on a Washington handpress by Bob Barris at the Press on Scroll Road, this book includes elegant wood engravings by Wesley Bates that complement the reflective and meditative beauty of Berry's poems.

Paul Praeder—an immensely complex character with the bravado of a Hemingway hero, the literary erudition and despair of Berryman’s Dream Songs persona, and the dark, self-destructive magnetism of Conrad’s Captain Kurtz—is a new and disturbing addition to the pantheon of American literary characters. His story unfolds over his 30-year correspondence with a young poet, and it is a story of lost moral compass, in which artistic integrity is traded for commercial success, and friendship and fidelity fall to lust and greed. James Baker Hall is currently the Poet Laureate of Kentucky.

Paul Praeder—an immensely complex character with the bravado of a Hemingway hero, the literary erudition and despair of Berryman’s Dream Songs persona, and the dark, self-destructive magnetism of Conrad’s Captain Kurtz—is a new and disturbing addition to the pantheon of American literary characters. His story unfolds over his 30-year correspondence with a young poet, and it is a story of lost moral compass, in which artistic integrity is traded for commercial success, and friendship and fidelity fall to lust and greed. James Baker Hall is currently the Poet Laureate of Kentucky.

James Baker Hall's blackly comic coming-of-age novel has been denied, by unfortunate circumstances surrounding its original 1964 publication, its rightful place alongside classics such as Catcher in the Rye and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in the canon of essential late-twentieth-century American fiction. Set in Lexington, Kentucky, the story unfolds through the eyes of thirteen-year-old Yates Paul. He becomes consumed with revelations about his inattentive father's loneliness, his grandmother's stormy relationship with his boisterous alcoholic uncle, and the frustration of being the best photography assistant in town when no one else knows it. In pursuing his career and falling in love with women twice his age, the precocious Yates falls back on Walter Mittyesque daydreams to cope with a frequently humorous, sometimes dark, world. Long respected among literary insiders, sought after but nearly impossible to obtain, this "lost" classic will finally reach the wider audience it deserves.

In his fifth book of poems, The Mother on the Other Side of the World, James Baker Hall revisits his dark childhood with a spiritual maturity earned of lifelong struggle with the forces of silence, secrecy, deception, and hiding. Without the usual linear guideposts and cathartic emotional epiphanies we've come to expect from contemporary poetry, he reveals the dangerous and strange aspects of family intimacies that are both universal and taboo. With talismanic images from the natural world, he refigures the mother's body as a timeless landscape, through which these visceral and worldly poems move. And move they surely do, with a distinctive panache, with great kinesthetic intensity and subtlety. A pilgrimage is implicit in the stops they make and in the sacraments they achieve. An experienced conjurer dealing with his deepest urgencies, Hall realizes a poetic technique in these poems that refracts embodied experience to reveal the energies-secular, spiritual, animal, and human-that come and go in forms. What these poems know-without explanation-is a grace beyond both intuition and belief. The Mother on the Other Side of the World is James Baker Hall's fifth book of poems. The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, and The Kenyon Review are among the many magazines to have published his work. He has received an NEA fellowship in poetry writing and has won both Pushcart and O. Henry prizes. He lives with his wife, fiction writer Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, in the Kentucky countryside and teaches at the University of Kentucky." James Baker Hall has consistently pursued in his poetry a trajectory that is deeply authentic. It has produced writing of daring and delicacy, over a period long enough to make it plain that this is not a momentary brilliance but a sustained vision. He has been dedicated to making the language reflect the surprise, the turns and leaps of memory and recurrent apparition in which pain and beauty are often indistinguishable. This new collection displays an intimate authority and mystery of tone that are the fulfillment of a genuine gift and uncompromising devotion to it."-W. S. Merwin"A delightful collection of poems depicting Hall's life long st

Mysterious, richly layered, new collection from an accomplished poet.