Books, Arts & Manners: New Hampshire Elegies

Kicking the Leaves By Donald Hall

Harper & Row, 61 pp., $8.95 Some poets eat; some do not. Homer ate (the plot of the Odyssey pivots on Odysseus’ refusing deifying ambrosia nectar at the table of the jerkwater nymph Calypso, dismissing immortality for his Penelope’s home cooking; hence Joyce’s introduction of his plebeian Odysseus with: “Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls”), but not so much as an antipasto gets passed around in all of Dante. Chaucer ate (chickens boilled in ther Mary bones, topped off by a blank manger, pop up quite soon in The Canterbury Tales); Walter Savage Landor ate (rhyming “venison” with “Tennyson”). Who can imagine an ode to a pot roast by Matthew Arnold?

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Kicking the Leaves By Donald Hall

Harper & Row, 61 pp., $8.95 Some poets eat; some do not. Homer ate (the plot of the Odyssey pivots on Odysseus’ refusing deifying ambrosia nectar at the table of the jerkwater nymph Calypso, dismissing immortality for his Penelope’s home cooking; hence Joyce’s introduction of his plebeian Odysseus with: “Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls”), but not so much as an antipasto gets passed around in all of Dante. Chaucer ate (chickens boilled in ther Mary bones, topped off by a blank manger, pop up quite soon in The Canterbury Tales); Walter Savage Landor ate (rhyming “venison” with “Tennyson”). Who can imagine an ode to a pot roast by Matthew Arnold?