Works by
James Baker Hall
(Photographer, Poet, Writer)
[April 14, 1935 – June 25, 2009]

Fiction

• Yates Paul, His Grand Flights, His Tootings (1963, 1964, 2002)
  James Baker Hall’s blackly comic coming-of-age novel has been denied, by unfortunate circumstances surrounding its original 1964 publication, its rightful place alongside classics such as Catcher in the Rye and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in the canon of essential late-twentieth-century American fiction.
  
  Set in Lexington, Kentucky, the story unfolds through the eyes of thirteen-year-old Yates Paul. He becomes consumed with revelations about his inattentive father’s loneliness, his grandmother’s stormy relationship with his boisterous alcoholic uncle, and the frustration of being the best photography assistant in town when no one else knows it. In pursuing his career and falling in love with women twice his age, the precocious Yates falls back on Walter Mittyesque daydreams to cope with a frequently humorous, sometimes dark, world.
  
  Long respected among literary insiders, sought after but nearly impossible to obtain, this "lost" classic will finally reach the wider audience it deserves.

Photography

• Pleasure (2007)

• Tobacco Harvest: An Elegy (2004)
  An insightful meditation on the shifting nature of humans’ relationships with the land and with each other, Berry’s essay laments the economic, political, and societal changes that have forever altered Kentucky’s rich agricultural traditions. Berry also adds a deeply personal perspective to Hall’s eloquent visual testimony. With a farm of his own nearby, Berry was a longtime friend and neighbor of the families shown in Hall’s pictures and took part in their work swapping. In addition to detailing the repetitive, strenuous labor involved in harvesting a tobacco crop, he relates memories of stories told, laughs shared, meals savored, and brief moments of rest and refreshment well earned.
  
  Hall’s striking photographs illuminate the characters and events that Berry describes. During the 1973 harvest, he photographed the rows stretching toward the horizon while laborers cut a tobacco crop, one plant at a time, until the last row was cut, hauled, and housed in the barn. These photographs powerfully convey the physical experiences of a Kentucky tobacco harvest: the heat of the sun, the dirt, and the people hard at work.

• A Spring-Fed Pond: My Friendships With Five Kentucky Writers over the Years (2000)

• Orphan in the Attic: Photographs by James Baker Hall (1995)

• Minor White: Rites and Passages (1978)
  "Minor White is one of the greatest of photographers. I do not make this statement lightly ...The sheer beauty of the medium of photography is tuned to the exact meaning of the visualized image." --Ansel Adams This selection of Minor White's superb photographs is accompanied by extensive, revealing excerpts from White's letters and amplified by James Baker Hall's perceptive observations of the artist-teacher at work. Essay by James Baker Hall. Paperback, 9.5 x 11.5 in./144 pgs

• Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1974)
  This volume - investigating the work of a particular photographer, in this case, Ralph Eugene Meatyard - comprises a 4000-word essay by an expert in the field, 55 photographs presented chronologically, each with a commentary, and a biography of the featured photographer.

Poetry

• Pleasure (2007)

• The Total Light Process: New and Selected Poems (2004)
  Nationally acclaimed poet, photographer, filmmaker, and novelist James Baker Hall has long been regarded as one of Kentucky’s most profound artists. Hall’s growing body of work is an essential part of Kentucky’s literary tradition, and yet his poetry in particular transcends the borders of the Commonwealth.
  
  The Total Light Process collects poems spanning Hall’s celebrated career as well as new poems that have never before been published. The subjects of Hall’s poems range from humorous and revealing portraits of his fellow writers and friends Wendell Berry, Ed McClanahan, and Gurney Norman, to the traumatic experience of his mother’s suicide when he was eight years old, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the tragic murder of Matthew Shepherd.

• Praeder's Letters: A Novel in Verse (2002)
  Paul Praeder—an immensely complex character with the bravado of a Hemingway hero, the literary erudition and despair of Berryman’s Dream Songs persona, and the dark, self-destructive magnetism of Conrad’s Captain Kurtz—is a new and disturbing addition to the pantheon of American literary characters. His story unfolds over his 30-year correspondence with a young poet, and it is a story of lost moral compass, in which artistic integrity is traded for commercial success, and friendship and fidelity fall to lust and greed.

• The Mother on the Other Side of the World (1999)
  In his fifth book of poems, The Mother on the Other Side of the World, James Baker Hall revisits his dark childhood with a spiritual maturity earned of lifelong struggle with the forces of silence, secrecy, deception, and hiding. Without the usual linear guideposts and cathartic emotional epiphanies we've come to expect from contemporary poetry, he reveals the dangerous and strange aspects of family intimacies that are both universal and taboo. With talismanic images from the natural world, he refigures the mother's body as a timeless landscape, through which these visceral and worldly poems move. And move they surely do, with a distinctive panache, with great kinesthetic intensity and subtlety. A pilgrimage is implicit in the stops they make and in the sacraments they achieve. An experienced conjurer dealing with his deepest urgencies, Hall realizes a poetic technique in these poems that refracts embodied experience to reveal the energies-secular, spiritual, animal, and human-that come and go in forms. What these poems know-without explanation-is a grace beyond both intuition and belief.

• Fast Signing Mute (1992)

• Stopping on the Edge to Wave (1988)
  A volume of poetry investigating firsts, losses, and overall light.

• Her Name (1982)

• Music for a Broken Piano (1982)

• Getting it On Up to the Brag (1975)

Other

• Home Ground: Southern Autobiography (1991), J. Bill Berry, ed.

• The Pushcart Prize, VIII: Best of the Small Presses (1982-84), Bill Henderson, ed.

• Traveling America with Today’s Poets (1977), David Kherdian, ed.

• 50 Contemporary Poets: The Creative Process (1977), Alberta T. Turner, ed.

• Kentucky Renaissance: An Anthology of Contemporary Writing (1976), Jonathon Greene, ed.

• Prize Stories 1968 -- The O. Henry Awards (1968), William Abrahams, ed.

• Stanford Short Stories 1962 (1962), Wallace Stegner and Richard Scowcroft, eds.