[All] the poems in Kicking the Leaves are about death, not food. Their persistent elegiac tone rises first of all from that roast pig, who—apple in mouth—in its anatomical wholeness touches the poet's sense of pity and starts him thinking about ancient modes of cooking when stoves were altars, slaughter was sacrifice, and ceremony attended both the death and the ingestion of animals….

Food takes Donald Hall's heart back to his family's rhythms of seasons and deaths, back to his memories of his great-grandfather's farm in New Hampshire which is now his own.

So rich a theme has generated poems about roses, horses, oxcarts, black-faced sheep. Hall writes with clarity and honesty, enlisting none of the usual strategies of poetry such as rhyme, meter, or a heightened diction. His words are plain and right, and his manner is casual and alert….

These poems are a celebration...