The Painted Bed

The former US poet laureate delivers a book “filled with raw sexual disclosures, rowdy anger and a self-blasting mockery” ( The New York Times ). Donald Hall’s fourteenth collection opens with an epigraph from the Urdu poet Faiz: “The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved.” In that poetic tradition, as in The Painted Bed , the beloved might be a person or something else—life itself, or the disappearing countryside. Hall’s new poems further the themes of love, death, and mourning so p