Reviews for Breakfast Served Any Time All Day: Essays on Poetry New and Selected

The average rating for Breakfast Served Any Time All Day: Essays on Poetry New and Selected based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-06-27 00:00:00 Wayne Snyder Donald Hall passed away two days ago at age 89. I bought this book for two dollars at a used books store years ago. It's a little inside baseball. I can't scan. I don't know my parts of speech or rules of grammar enough to hang with many of the essays, but this was a pleasure to read. A pleasure most often because Hall is insistent on the pleasure of poetry being its highest standard. He was an old, grumpy dude. Egotistical and well aware of it, he wallowed in and also rose above his station when he wrote about his life's work. Rather it be poetry, reading, writing about poetry, or calling contemporary poets on their bullshit. I've also owned a copy of Hall's too long selected poems, White Apples and a Taste of Stone, for years, and dip into every once in a while. I hope this leads me to a deeper engagement and reading more poems from it aloud. Perhaps to my beautiful wife, my infant daughter, the dog, or just to myself in the den.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-06-16 00:00:00 James Fulton Donald Hall is like a cantankerous old cow chewing on its cud. To avoid any misunderstandings, let me emphasize that this is a highly poetic cow, and the cud is, of course, language. When he writes, in his wonderful new collection of essays on poetry, Breakfast Served Any Time All Day, that poetry is all about the "mouth-pleasure, the muscle-pleasure," you can't help but imagine his jaw turning over and over. "Anybody knows that the word food fills no bellies," Hall says, "but the word food is for chewing on all the same: ef that sets lip to tooth, ou that rounds the lips as if for kissing, deh that smacks tongue onto mouth-top. The word carries no calories but in a receptive mouth the juices flow." Poetry, in other words, is not sound, but the making of sound. It's not love; it's sex. (And writing is like orgasm, moans the 76-year-old Hall at one point'only it takes longer.) Read my full review here: