By TOM MAYO / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

Donald Hall, who is finishing his first month as our poet laureate, does not fit the mold set by recent laureates. He hasn't created a Web site that collects America's favorite poems, as did Robert Pinsky. There is no weekly poetry column for The Washington Post (Robert Hass) or for any newspaper that wants to print it free of charge (Ted Kooser). Also missing are two collections of poems to be read during high schools' morning announcements (Billy Collins).

If his first month on the job is any indication, though, Mr. Hall will keep a busy schedule that would wear down most other 78-year-olds. Following his inaugural reading at the Library of Congress, Mr. Hall read from his work for Medical Grand Rounds at Dartmouth Medical School and as part of the "medicine and spirituality" series at the University of Vermont's medical school the last week of October. Both appearances incorporated his poems about the illness and death of his wife, poet Jane Kenyon, in 1995.

Mr. Hall is one of the most productive writers and editors of the generation that came of age immediately after World War II. In addition to his 17 volumes of poetry, he has published prose works about sports and life at Eagle Pond Farm in New Hampshire, served as poetry editor and consultant for the University of Michigan Press and The Paris Review and edited anthologies and collections of essays about poets and poetry.

Almost 15 years after it first appeared, his introductory college text, To Read A Poem (Thomson/Wadsworth, $55.76), is still one of the most worthwhile additions to this increasingly competitive genre. Of his collected prose pieces, my favorite is Death to the Death of Poetry: Essays, Reviews, Notes, Interviews (University of Michigan Press, $14.95). Chatty (even gossipy), irreverent and insightful, this book is worth the price for the title essay alone, which rings as true today as when it first appeared in 1989.

His poems, however, got him his current gig, and if you are not yet a fan, you are in for a treat. Earlier this year, Mr. Hall published 226 of his essential poems, in White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006 (Houghton Mifflin, $30).

It is a slightly infuriating collection that stubbornly refuses to identify poems with their original volumes or the years in which they appeared. Mr. Hall has changed some poems' titles, revised lines in some pieces, and dropped whole stanzas from others, making this more of a new work than is the case with most poets' "collected and selected" volumes. Eighteen new (and previously uncollected) poems are included, as well as a CD of Mr. Hall reading 37 works, starting with one of his earliest ("Love Is Like Sounds") and ending with last year's estimable "Tennis Ball." Both poems illustrate the subjects that have been at the core of Mr. Hall's poetry for 60 years: love, death and New Hampshire.

Many of Mr. Hall's best poems record the sights, sounds and smells of what is around him. The diarist-poet transports us to Wilmot, N.H., or to Boston, where we are as likely to find ourselves at Brigham and Women's Hospital as at Fenway Park. In his eagerness to share the layers of daily detail, Mr. Hall resembles his predecessor as poet laureate, Nebraskan Ted Kooser, though with some major differences.

When Dana Gioia celebrated Mr. Kooser in his 1992 essay, "The Anonymity of the Regional Poet," he paused to point out Mr. Kooser's limitations: "Looking across all his mature work, one sees a narrow range of technical means, an avoidance of stylistic or thematic complexity, little interest in ideas and an unwillingness to work in longer forms." (Mr. Gioia went on to say that limitations are not necessarily weaknesses and that Mr. Kooser's limitations derived directly from his manifest strengths as a poet.)

To a startling degree, Mr. Kooser's limitations perfectly mirror Mr. Hall's poetic strengths, making him a worthy successor to Mr. Kooser in more ways than one.

Tom Mayo teaches "Law, Literature & Medicine" at Southern Methodist University and at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas.