Let Evening Come

The work of America's Jane Kenyon (1947-95) is one of poetry's rarest and most heart-breaking gifts. After fighting depression for most of her life, Jane Kenyon died from leukemia at the age of 47. 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. They are psalms of love and death, God and nature, joy and despair. Introduced by Donald Hall and Joyce Peseroff, Let Evening Come also includes an interview with Jane Kenyon, her thoughts on poetry, and her translations of 20 poems by Anna Akhmatova.

Jane Kenyon has made something of an aesthetic of quiet, and her poems have a brooding introversion. Rare among American poets she is also able to infuse her poetry with a lightly worn sense of Christian humility, and an active – if worried – sense of mercy. These are among the qualities which give her verse both the tones and the turns of serious prayer. Within the subtle yet dramatic use of rhyme and sound in Let Evening Come, she evokes not only the drama of her need to speak, but also the deep communion and solace within any reader’s need to listen., Her words, with their quiet, rapt force, their pensiveness and wit, come to us from natural speech, from the Bible and hymns, from which she derived the singular psalmlike music that is hers alone., If Sylvia Plath was Our Lady of the Rages, Jane was Our Lady of the Sorrows, Our Lady of Vulnerability.

Jane Kenyon (1947-95) was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and grew up in the Midwest. She earned a B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1970 and an M.A. in 1972. That same year, she married the poet Donald Hall, whom she had met while a student at the University of Michigan. With him she moved to Eagle Pond Farm in New Hampshire. During her lifetime Jane Kenyon published four books of poetry—: Constance (1993), Let Evening Come (1990), The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986), and From Room to Room (1978), —and a book of translation, Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova (1985). In December 1993 she and Donald Hall were the subject of an Emmy Award-winning Bill Moyers documentary, A Life Together. She was named poet laureate of New Hampshire in 1995, but died later that year, from leukaemia. Posthumously published editions of her work have included Otherwise: New & Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 1996), A Hundred White Daffodils: Essays, Interviews, the Akhmatova Translations, Newspaper Columns, and One Poem (Graywolf Press, 1999) Let Evening Come: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2005), and Collected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2005). In 2004, Ausable Press published Letters to Jane, a compilation of letters written by the poet Hayden Carruth to Kenyon in the year between her diagnosis and her death. Her poem ‘Let Evening Come’ was featured in the film In Her Shoes, in a scene where the character played by Cameron Diaz reads the poem (as well as ‘One Art’ by Elizabeth Bishop) to a blind nursing home resident.