Jane Kenyon

Otherwise collects a lifetime's work by one of contemporary poetry's most cherished talents. Opening with twenty new poems and including generous selections from Jane Kenyon's four previous books—From Room to Room, The Boat of Quiet Hours, Let Evening Come, and Constance—this collection was selected and arranged by Kenyon herself—alongside her husband, the esteemed poet Donald Hall—shortly before her death in April 1995. This extensive gathering reveals a scrupulously crafted body of work in which poem after poem achieves a rare and somber grace. Light and shade are never far apart in these telling narratives of life and love and work at the poet's rural New Hampshire home. The shadow of depression in Kenyon's verse, which grew much darker and longer at certain intervals, has the force and heft of a spiritual presence—a god, demon, angel. Yet her work emphasizes the constant effort of her imagination to confront and even find redemption in suffering. However quiet or domesticated or subtle in her moods and methods, Kenyon was a poet who sought to discover the extraordinary within the ordinary, and her poems continue to make this discovery. As Hall writes in the afterword to Otherwise, we share "her joy in the body and the creation, in flowers, music, and paintings, in hayfields and a dog."

New & Selected Poems

Otherwise

The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon

In A Hundred White Daffodils - an enlightening and typically endearing collection of prose and poetry - the late author of five highly regarded books of verse reflects on her writing life, growing spirituality, passionate hobbies, and ultimately fatal struggle with leukemia. Jane Kenyon is one of the most beloved poets on the contemporary American scene; this book shows us why and how this came to be.

Essays, Interviews, The Akhmatova Translations, Newspaper Columns, and One Poem

A Hundred White Daffodils

Jane Kenyon is considered one of America's best contemporary poets. Her previous collection, Otherwise: New & Selected Poems, published just after her death in 1995, has been a favorite among readers, with over 60,000 copies in print, and is a contemporary classic. Now at the ten-year anniversary of her death, Kenyon's Collected Poems assembles all of her published poetry in one book. Included here are the complete poems found in her four previous volumes--From Room to Room, The Boat of Quiet Hours, Let Evening Come, and Constance--as well as the poems that appear in her posthumous volumes Otherwise and A Hundred White Daffodils, four poems never before published in book form, and her translations in Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova.

Collected Poems

Poems

The Boat of Quiet Hours

Hayden Carruth

Letters To Jane

Somber poems deal with the end of summer, winter dawn, travel, mortality, childhood, education, nature and the spiritual aspects of life

Let Evening Come

The poems in Jane Kenyon's first book are full of respect for a life deeply felt. Her vision apprehends the mystery beneath everyday circumstances and objects, from the thimble to the edges of the map. The final section is translations of six poems by Anna Akhmatova.

From Room to Room

The poems sound the depths of depressive illness and grief brought on by illness and the death of loved ones.

Constance

“Jane Kenyon had a virtually faultless ear. She was an exquisite master of the art of poetry.” —Wendell Berry Published twenty-five years after her untimely death, The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon presents the essential work of one of America’s most cherished poets—celebrated for her tenacity, spirit, and grace. In their inquisitive explorations and direct language, Jane Kenyon’s poems disclose a quiet certainty in the natural world and a lifelong dialogue with her faith and her questioning of it. As a crucial aspect of these beloved poems of companionship, she confronts her struggle with severe depression on its own stark terms. Selected by Kenyon’s husband, Donald Hall, just before his death in 2018, The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon collects work from across a life and career that will be, as she writes in one poem, “simply lasting.”

Poems deal with childhood, family, nature, travel, illness, love, death, pain, the human spirit, and God

New and Selected Poems

William Bolcom

(Vocal Collection). A 1996 cycle of songs for soprano and piano. Poems by Jane Kenyon, composed for Benite Valente.

A Cycle of Songs from Poems of Jane Kenyon : for Voice and Piano

Briefly it Enters

Superwoman is alive and well and strutting around in her stilettos, sabotaging our right to an imperfect life. She is feeding our insecurities, she is damaging our self belief, she is sabotaging our businesses, our careers and our relationships and she is NOT a great life model to pass on to our daughters. She is what happens when we buy into the modern myth of ‘having it all’ and she has to go! She empowers us to stay small; shop for things we don’t need; obsess over eternal youth and multi task within an inch of emotional exhaustion on a daily basis. Jane has spent the past 10 years empowering and inspiring thousands of women to step up and shine through her aspirational brand The Well Heeled Divas and has seen far too many Superwomen in meltdown! There is a better place to live. One where your authentic soul is nurtured, your vulnerability is nourished and you are allowed to be you. Controlling everything does not give you power, it gives you a blinding headache! We need to learn to let go, say no, accept help, stop controlling everything, recognise the power of vulnerability and stop beating ourselves up for failing to hit perfect 24/7. This book uncovers how Superwoman is showing up in our professional life, our businesses, our marriages, in our role as mothers, in our attraction strategy and in our identity. It is a call out to women everywhere to be kinder to ourselves and each other and to reclaim our feminine power.

Jane Kenyon

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