SOURCE: “The High Pasture,” in Sewanee Review, Vol. 102, No. 3, Summer, 1994, pp. lxxxix-xc.

In the following review, Sherry offers a positive assessment of both Life Work and The Museum of Clear Ideas.

[Life Work and The Museum of Clear Ideas] are olympian books. They are wise, but are written against every convention of wisdom.

Life Work turns its diary of the quotidian into a treatise in which the duties and pleasures of labor are measured. The mixed attitude of duty and joy suffuses Mr. Hall's prose, its cadences alternately stately and capricious, elegiac and carnivalesque. A mock-classical decorum provides tonal unity for the long title poem of The Museum of Clear Ideas, whose shadowy protagonist—Horace Horsecollar—holds the sequence together in a fusion of Horatian gravities and cartoon simplicities.

Such combinations are high artifice, and the hand of a master craftsman shows in his fashioning of sentences into...