JANE KENYON

An intimate portrait of the tormented poet.

Drawing on key primary sources and numerous interviews, Greene, who has written biographies of Denise Levertov and Elizabeth Jennings, has fashioned a subtle, sensitive portrait of a “complex, talented, and ambitious” woman. In her early years, Jane Kenyon (1947-1995) was quiet and moody. At the University of Michigan, she took poetry classes from the enthusiastic poet Donald Hall and won her first poetry prize. With both adrift and despite a large age difference, they married in 1972—to “marry him was to marry poetry,” Greene writes. They moved to Hall’s ancestral farm home in Wilmot, New Hampshire, which Kenyon came to love, and she found joy in writing, gardening, the local community, and a newfound spirituality. She translated the poems of Anna Akhmatova and co-founded and edited a poetry journal. Her first collection, From Room to Room, is “central to understanding Kenyon’s legacy.” Throughout, Greene carefully discusses each collection, highlighting their themes and individual poems. Eventually, Kenyon’s success strained her marriage, which led to an affair. At the time, she “was deeply depressed, and it seemed that only drugs and frequent sex gave relief.” In 1989, Hall was diagnosed with cancer. Kenyon was gaining prestige, but her depression continued, evident in her longest poem “Having It Out with Melancholy.” The U.S. Information Agency invited both of them to give talks in India, which resulted in her poetry becoming more political and socially aware. In 1993, Bill Moyers traveled to Wilmot for a TV documentary. After an interview with Terry Gross for NPR, the couple went to India again. In 1994, Kenyon was diagnosed with leukemia; Hall’s cancer was in remission. After a bone-marrow transplant, Kenyon’s life was one of routine and calamity. Greene gracefully chronicles her final days. Kenyon “democratized poetry….In her poems readers experience beauty transforming sorrow.”

On the dry side, but a solid, poignant biography.