Otherwise: New & Selected Poems | Jane Kenyon | Poetry for the human experience

Otherwise: New & Selected Poems | Jane Kenyon | Captivating and Honest

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Otherwise: New & S...

	Otherwise: New & Selected Poems Jane Kenyon Graywolf Press, 1997 - 230 pages average customer review:based on 6 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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."

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Poetry for the human experience

It was this anthology of poetry that transformed my mother from a woman who dislikes poetry to a woman who reads it every day. I read her one poem and got her hooked. Jane Kenyen speaks directly to her reader, using simple images and plain language, capturing experiences that often feel familiar and sometimes reminding us of their meaning and significance. This is not poetry that could be shouted at a poetry slam or puzzled over by scholars looking for allusions to Sanskrit texts. This is poetry about our lives, about burying the cat, ironing a tablecloth, saying goodbye to guests, winter weather, faith, sadness, and love. I love poetry, but sometimes it feels daunting and inaccessible. Jane Kenyon writes like I am her guest, sitting at her kitchen table, and she has a moment to share.

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Captivating and Honest

I absolutely love this book. Jane Kenyon's poetry describes some of the most simple, daily activities in a way that brings out their hidden beauty and grace. You can sense the careful observation and truthfullness of what she describes, yet as you read you can interpret the symbolism behind certain passages and the realizations there aswell. I feel so deeply connected with this book. Her poetry speaks the words we cannot say. You won't regret buying this book.

Bright Stars on a Winter Night

Jane Kenyon's OTHERWISE is perhaps the best collection of American poetry in the past decade. With her accessible and illuminating poems, Ms. Kenyon captures the essence of life in all its ordinariness and extraordinariness. "Let Evening Come," for example, is a nearly perfect gem -- thoughtful, concise, movingly eloquent. Throughout this collection, the poet demonstrates a remarkable clarity of vision; her diction and meter are gorgeous, her wit and insight profound yet never burdensome. Whether recalling a scene from her childhood, an hour in winter, a cancer treatment, a death in the family, or a walk with the dog, Ms. Kenyon inspires, illuminates, and entertains.

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The Struggle and Beauty of Living

Jane Kenyon's poems show a keen observation of everyday detail -- "the luminous particular," as her husband Donald Hall puts it -- with a muted level of emotion. A typical poem in this ample collection meanders through several fine images, then pulls them together at the end with a description of mood or a realization. Kenyon is especially fond of the smell of wet earth, the sound of rain, and images of water. In general, her images are much more successful than her similes. Some of her beautiful phrases are reminiscent of traditional Chinese poetry: "...the water...stares back at the moon from its cool terra-cotta urn"; of Sharon Olds: "Not dark enough, not the utter darkness he desired"; and of Anna Akhmatova, whom she translated from the Russian, cf. Kenyon's poem "The Appointment." In the poem "Trouble with Math..." an incident about undeserved punishment ends with, "She led me, blinking and changed, back to! the class." -- Changed in what way? The author's language is spare and delicate, but sometimes the point gets lost. The overall impression is that the author was straining toward happiness, and she made the most of the occasional window of opportunity allowed her by illness. I found the book pleasant to read, but when it was once closed, very little remained with me. This author does not have the same clarity and robustness as, say, Luise Gluck, another poet who suffered from depression. But I did find Jane Kenyon poignant and alive when she spoke directly about her experience of illness, e.g. when she says, "I'm falling upward, nothing to hold me down."

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reviews: page 1, 2

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