Jane Kenyon’s poetry makes me consider our ordinary, expected experiences in ways I haven’t before. Not in the way someone like Louise Glück might present a contrarian view, but as a reminder: ‘don’t forget that this also happens to us.’ Viewing life through different angles. Jane Kenyon’s life was full of such differing angles and she took the time to explore them.
As a reader of Jane Kenyon’s poetry, I have wished for a full biography. That there hasn’t been an accessible book examining her work and life is a disservice to a truly influential poet of the late twentieth century.
Now, Dana Greene has given us such a book. Greene has placed Jane Kenyon’s life and work in the foreground and pulled her away from the shadow of Kenyon’s husband, poet Donald Hall.
Greene’s meticulously researched book approaches Kenyon’s life and work through her spiritual life. A spirituality expressed through her poems, her writing, and her interactions with those closest to her. This unique approach honors Kenyon’s work in a way that a purely literary examination of Kenyon would not. Greene connects Kenyon’s self-described expression of “the interior” in her poetry to a questioning of the human condition. Kenyon’s use of concrete details found in small, personal, and ordinary places was the foundation for an expansive poetry. One that does not easily fit within literary poetic expectations. A long way of saying she was a unique and influential voice.
This book is an important look behind the life and work of an unpretentious poet not seeking approval from the literary highbrow. As any writer, she hoped to leave a legacy, and she achieved that through artful and accessible poetry. Poems that invite us to embrace the many angles in our lives. The importance of questioning and the idea that asking matters more than answering.
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