SOURCE: “Donald Hall's The One Day,” in Salmagundi, Nos. 85–8, Winter, 1990, pp. 344–50.

In the following review, Pollack offers a positive assessment of The One Day and classifies the poem as a modernist work.

Born in Hamden, Conn. in 1928, Donald Hall has lived since 1975 in a New Hampshire farmhouse where his grandmother was born in 1878 and his mother in 1903. The mother seems a supportive figure; when, as a child, the poet cried for her after lights-out, she made much less fuss about it than, say, Proust's mother. Hall (by which I mean both the reigning persona of the poems and the man in the interviews) seems remarkably unalienated. Not “happy”; Freud's remark about replacing “hysterical misery” with “ordinary unhappiness,” one of the epigraphs in The One Day, is its article of faith. What is true of sense of self also applies to that of history: the speaker in Part I...