SOURCE: “The Way We Write Now,” in New York Review of Books, Vol. 45, No. 12, July 16, 1998, p. 41.

In the following excerpt, Bayley discusses Hall's exploration of grief in Without.

Poets must often write to cheer themselves up, and in so doing the good ones can cheer up their readers as well. Thomas Hardy's passionate love lyrics to his dead wife, the wife to whom when she was alive he had paid very little attention for thirty years and more, are also an acknowledgment of himself as he was, an acceptance of what he had done, or failed to do. So moving are these poems, and in a sense so self-delighting, that the reader too feels calmed and blessed at second-hand, endowed while he reads them with the same sort of self-acceptance.

This is the art that moves Donald Hall's poems to and for his dead wife, the poet Jane...