Meghan Coyle
A Review of Waiting by Donald Hall
Published for the first time in 1998, Waiting, by Donald Hall, is a heartbreaking sequence of poems written before, during, and after the death of his wife, poet Jane Kenyon, who died of cancer in 1995. The work is both exceedingly personal and vivid with a complicated honesty, one of almost excessive self-deprecation or guilt that both adds, and occasionally detracts from the work as a whole.
The majority of the work is written in 3rd person as a long poem broken up and place in between Hall’s other poems about specific moments or personal battles he faced during the progression of Jane’s illness. The long poem, entitled “Her Long Illness,” is an epic battle between Hall’s desire to give Jane the memoriam she deserves, and his own suffering. He portrays her in a light of the quiet soul suffering in the loud body. Her illness is described in full detail, from liver transplants to catheters and her ever balding head; but it’s as if the illness is a separate entity that attacks without reason or warning. Jane is forever Jane, strong-willed and passionate, but her body changes:
“They flew all day across
the country to the hospital for hard cases.
The night before Jane
entered isolation in Seattle for chemo,
TBI, and a stranger’s
bone marrow—for life or death—they slept
together, as they understood,
maybe for the last time. His body
curved into Jane’s,
his knees tucked to the backs of her knees;
he pressed her warm soft thighs,
back, waist, and rump, making the spoons,
and the spoons clattered
with a sound like the end man’s bones.”
It is apparent that in these sections the physical fights the mental. Hall uses words like curved, warm, and soft, and at first it feels as though he is describing her body; and yet as he curves into her, as the spoons touch, they clatter like the bones of death. Hall then makes us question which is soft, the idea of Jane, her personality and what she was, or the Jane that is melding to his body, but in its hollowing shell.
If Hall depicts Jane as the hero, he then is both the victim and the villain. He has an alarming amount of self pity and guilt that tends to detract from the first part of the book. Before the official death of Jane, Hall mainly sticks to pieces of the long poem with occasional glimpses of his internal emotions and specific incidents entwined with separate poems. When he is writing the long poem, however, he begins by describing the process of Jane’s illness, and eventually starts describing the 3rd person view of his own struggles, such as when Jane tells him, “I wish you could feel what I feel,” and he then goes on to describe the dream he had where she sprays his body with acid and he attempts to murder her. It is in these moments that our pain for Jane lessens and our dislike for Hall begins. In a sense he seems to be asking for the sympathy of an audience who is seeing a woman perish, and a man feeding off her pain to inspire his own.
While the entire book is heartbreaking, the final official poems after his wife’s death, commencing with the poem that inspired the book, “Without,” and ending with “Weeds and Peonies,” are the truly emotional poems. Each piece is written almost as a letter to Jane, describing his thoughts and emotions at holidays and specific intervals of time after her death. At the beginning of the poems, he talks of visits to Jane’s grave, of her gardening and the little habits she had that he now continues; He mentions their dog Gus, who waits for her at the parlor, and he continues a routine life which revolves around the absence of her;
I cannot discard
Your jeans or lotions or T-shirts.
I cannot disturb your tumbles
of scarves and floppy hats.
Lost unfinished things remain
on your desk, in your purse
or Shaker basket. Under a cushion
I discover your silver thimble.
Today when the telephone rang
I thought it was you. (from “Letter in Autumn”)
Eventually Hall begins to come to terms. While still visiting her grave, he begins to move forward; he thinks of what she would do he had died instead, he notices his animals cuddle up next to him now, and he comes to terms with the fact that some of her peonies might topple, and they do.
Hall has bursts of inspiration throughout the piece, and often it seems as though the process of her death and his grief is the process of writing poetry, and that in the end his creation of a poem all about her, for her, is the acceptance of what has happened. The volume was release three years after her death; it lacks basically any formal style especially in his long poem, and mostly in his separate pieces except with the formation of stanzas. He writes about her death as beautifully as he can, because poetry is what he understands and how he expresses himself, “When you wrote about lovemaking or cancer, /about absences or a quarrel, /I loved to turn up in your poems. / I imagined those you’d make/after I died; I regretted/I wouldn’t be able to read them.” If Jane ever loved to turn up in his poems, this would be the ultimate gift, and that’s why it was made; he suffered and was inspired by her.