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From a former Poet Laureate, a new collection of essays delivering agloriously unexpectedview from the vantage point ofvery old age Donald Hall has lived a remarkable life of letters, a career capped by a National Medal of the Arts, awarded by the president. Now, in the unknown, unanticipated galaxy of very old age, he is writing searching essays that startle, move, and delight. In the transgressive and horrifyingly funny No Smoking, he looks back over his lifetime, and several of his ancestors lifetimes, of smoking unfiltered cigarettes, packs of them every day. Hall paints his past Decades followed each other thirty was terrifying, forty I never noticed because I was drunk, fifty was best with a total change of life, sixty extended the bliss of fifty .