Donald Hall wrote his first poem, “The End of All,” at age twelve, while under the spell of Edgar Allan Poe. Through the years his retelling of it has varied, but the gist is:

Have you ever thought / Of the nearness of death to you? / It follows you through the day, / It screams through the night / Until that moment when, / In monotones loud, / Death calls your name / Then, then comes the end of all.

Mortality is a theme Hall has stuck to for seven decades. Open a book of his poems or essays at random and plop down a finger, and chances are you’ll land on some combination of death, grief, interment, loss, and the humiliation of aging—in other words, the long, haunting slide into the grave. Even when his work is not explicitly about death, its world and the things in it are frail or in danger of disappearing for-ever: a beloved dog or farm horse, apples plucked from a tree, a childhood memory, an old love. In 1955’s “My Son My Executioner,” the otherwise happy occasion of a newborn child manages to put steel in Hall’s spine: “Sweet death, small son, our instrument / Of immortality, / Your cries and hungers document / Our bodily decay.”

But Hall can also be funny, especially about his own death, as in his essay collection Essays after Eighty (2014): “It’s almost relaxing to know I’ll die fairly soon, as it’s a comfort not to obsess about my next orgasm.” Ambition has passed him by. “My goal in life is making it to the bathroom.”

Hall is the Homer of the ordinary doozies that we rarely notice: “We ate, and talked, and went to bed / And slept. It was a miracle” (from “Summer Kitchen”). There’s also the Red Sox, the joys of solitude and farm life, of breakfast and evening snowfall and afternoon romps in the sack, of smoky views of Mount Kearsarge—all of the small adventures in domes-tic tranquility.

Hall grew up in Hamden, Connecticut, and spent summers at the family’s Eagle Pond Farm in Wilmot, New Hamp-shire. He attended Harvard with some heavies of midcentury American letters: Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Robert Bly, and, down the road at Radcliffe, Adrienne Rich. Later, he became poetry editor of The Paris Review during its formative years. (A rejected Allen Ginsberg complained to George Plimpton that Hall “wouldn’t know a poem if it buggered [him] in broad daylight.”)

In 1957, Hall joined the English faculty at the University of Michigan and, by his account, was that rare species of writer who actually enjoyed teaching. He put in seventeen years before bailing on...