TV REVIEWS : The Poetry in PBS’ ‘A Life Together’

For poet Donald Hall, the fascination with his art is how “it is pointing south, but going north,” seeming to be about one thing, but actually about another. For Hall’s wife and partner, Jane Kenyon, a poem can “ease people’s burdens.”

In its own way, “A Life Together,” the new segment of “Bill Moyers’ Journal” (at 9 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28; 8 p.m., KVCR-TV Channel 15; 8:30 p.m., KPBS-TV Channel 15) is a Hall and Kenyon poem combined. Its titular spirit points to life, but is actually about death; its portrait of an artist couple sharing pleasure and pain together is a kind of release.

Perhaps by Hall’s and Kenyon’s request, we are allowed so far and no further into their private world surrounded by the verdant fecundity on Eagle Pond near the New Hampshire town of Wilmot. We never see them actually living in Hall’s old ancestral farmhouse home. Instead, in true Yankee style, their attention is on their work, the handicraft suggested in Hall’s phrase, “I took it from the air and made a poem of it.”

Hall, with his National Book Award and other prizes and dozens of published volumes, is the better-known poet, but Kenyon (who’s also a translator) is perhaps more emotionally powerful, with a body of work largely based on her battle to overcome manic depression. She reads in a calm, slightly melancholic voice, observing the tiny detail--the “long grey hair” of one of Hall’s grandmothers found while scrubbing the kitchen floor. He reads with demonstrative hands and flashing teeth, often observing the big object, such as nearby Mt. Kearsarge, or the big idea, such as “In Praise of Death.”

And though Hall admits that he was a “morbid” child as he saw many of his relatives die from cancer, his own attention to death matches Kenyon’s personal approach: Colon cancer struck him a few years ago, and while it’s now in remission, he’s aware that it may return at any time. Suddenly, this is a man and woman sharing the end of a life together, vividly aware of every moment along the way toward the inevitable final word.