Portrait of Your Niece was first published in 1959.Carol Hall wrote her first poem, addressed to Santa Claus, when she was four years old. She has been writing ever since and has contributed poems to many magazines, but this is the first collection of her poetry to be published in book form. The volume contains fifty lyric and dramatic poems.Richard Eberhart comments: “Carol Hall’s poems are mature, tightly written and full of thought. She is not afraid to take a hard look at the truth. She can be light-hearted too. There is a sophisticated mind always present in the varying views and evaluations in this book.”Another interesting comment on this collection comes from Arnold Stein: “What especially attracts me is the voice I hear in the poems -- distinctive, wonderfully modulated, and remaining somehow itself even while expressing the intensities and surprises of the imagination with skill and force and courage.”Among the poems in this volume are some that have appeared previously in Botteghe Oscure (Italy), the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Sewanee Review, New World Writing, Poetry, Western Review, Quarterly Review of Literature, Folder, Perspective, Voices, Experiment, Interim, and Poetry Northwest.