Jane Kenyon Książki

“Jane Kenyon had a virtually faultless ear. She was an exquisite master of the art of poetry.” ―Wendell BerryPublished 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.”

The work of Jane Kenyon is a gift to poetry. Her quietly musical poems are intensely moving, compassionate meditations intently probing the life of the heart and spirit. Observing and absorbing small miracles in everyday life, these apparently simple poems grapple with fundamental questions of human existence.

<i>Otherwise</i> collects a lifetime's work of poetry by one of our most cherished poets. Opening with twenty poems and including generous selections from Jane Kenyon's four previous books-- <i>From Room to Room</i>, <i>The Boat of Quiet Hours</i>, <i>Let Evening Come</i>, and <i>Constance</i>-- this collection was selected and arranged by Kenyon shortly before her death in April 1995. This extensive collection 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 at the poet's New Hampshire home. The shadow of depression in Jane Kenyon's verse has the force of a spiritual presence-- a god, demon, angel. Yet her work emphasizes the constant effort of her imagination to redeem her suffering. As her husband Donald Hall writes in the afterword to <i>Otherwise</i>, we share "her joy in the body and the creation, in flowers, music, and paintings, in hayfields and a dog."