The essays in this collection cover Hall's life. Some emphasized the personal, his marriage, family, love and loss. Others focused on professional relationships with writers and poets. I preferred the more personal. ( )

Donald Hall was a poet and professor at the University of Michigan when I was there in the 1960s, but I never met him. He died from congestive heart failure at 89 the year A Carnival of Losses was published. These short essays, some of which were previously published in the New Yorker magazine, give a moving, sometimes humorous portrait of Hall’s last years. He talks a lot about his second wife who died in 1995 and who was clearly the love of his life. He says little about his first wife, his two children, or his longtime companion Linda Kunhardt who was still spending two nights a week with him. He laments that his creative writing slowed as he aged, so that the 750-word essays he wrote for the New Yorker took dozens of drafts. I suspect that the extra drafts are more the result of a willingness to polish for which he might not have had the patience when he was younger. Highly crafted prose and a hard-earned wisdom give these essays enduring value. 4 stars. ( )

As he approached the age of ninety former poet laureate of the United States, Donald Hall, wrote this collection of essays. In them he reflected on the life of someone approaching the end, reminisced about things that happened to him when he was younger, and recorded his thoughts on his fellow poets. Many of the essays were moving, especially given the perspective of someone who was nearing the end of their life. The section on his thoughts on other poets was less interesting to me, primarily because I am not familiar with most of the people he was talking about. The final essay, "Tree Day," was poignant as it was the one where he most directly addressed the fact that his days were numbered and how he wanted to leave something for the future. ( )