Warm tributes to a ‘plain’ poet

IN the years since poet Jane Kenyon’s death in 1995 at age 47, her husband, poet Donald Hall, has written much that shows him still grappling with the loss of his wife to leukemia. But Kenyon is more than Hall’s muse. She remains a celebrated poet whose work and memory are being honored with the publication this month of “Simply Lasting: Writers on Jane Kenyon,” edited by Joyce Peseroff, and “Jane Kenyon: Collected Poems” from Graywolf Press.

“Simply Lasting” isn’t really a book of critical views, though critical insights abound. A collection of reminiscences and responses to Kenyon and her art, the book has more the mood of a dinner party that she and Hall might have thrown at their New Hampshire farmhouse. “I loved Jane’s presence in her house, her laughter over onions.... “ writes Robert Bly.

“Jane Kenyon had a virtually faultless ear,” Wendell Berry writes. “Her voice always carries the tremor of feeling disciplined by art. This is what over and over again enabled her to take the risk of plainness, or of apparent plainness.”

In May, Hall also published a book of prose, “The Best Day the Worst Day: Life With Jane Kenyon.” Like its counterpart volumes of poetry -- “Without” and “The Painted Bed” -- “The Best Day” shows a marriage of poets far removed from the tragic example of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. For 23 years, Kenyon and Hall accommodated each other as artists and as companions, in good times and in bad, during his colon cancer scare and when her bone marrow transplant failed.

Hall’s descriptions of their ferny, mossy New England existence seem otherworldly next to the average suburbanite’s, but he firmly declares that what they learned as a couple was a simple lesson accessible to all. “With rare exceptions,” he writes, “we remained aware of each other’s feelings. It took me half my life, more than half, to discover with Jane’s guidance that two people could live together and remain kind.”

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From “Jane Kenyon: Collected Poems”

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“Let Evening Come”

Let the light of late afternoon

shine through chinks in the barn, moving

up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing

as a woman takes up her needles

and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned

in long grass. Let the stars appear

and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.

Let the wind die down. Let the shed

go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop

in the oats, to air in the lung

let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t

be afraid. God does not leave us

comfortless, so let evening come.

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From “Having It Out

With Melancholy”

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9 Wood Thrush

High on Nardil and June light

I wake at four,

waiting greedily for the first

notes of the wood thrush. Easeful air

presses through the screen

with the wild, complex song

of the bird, and I am overcome

by ordinary contentment.

What hurt me so terribly

all my life until this moment?

How I love the small, swiftly

beating heart of the bird

singing in the great maples;

its bright, unequivocal eye.

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“Mosaic of the Nativity:

Serbia, Winter 1993”

On the domed ceiling God

is thinking:

I made them my joy,

And everything else I created

I made to bless them.

But see what they do!

I know their hearts

and arguments:

“We’re descended from

Cain. Evil is nothing new,

so what does it matter now

if we shell the infirmary,

and the well where the fearful

and rash alike must

come for water?”

God thinks Mary into being.

Suspended at the apogee

of the golden dome,

she curls in a brown pod,

and inside her the mind

of Christ, cloaked in blood,

lodges and begins to grow.