Description
Book SynopsisDemystifying the “Poet Laureate of Depression” Pleasure-loving, sarcastic, stubborn, determined, erotic, deeply sad--Jane Kenyon’s complexity and contradictions found expression in luminous poems that continue to attract a passionate following. Dana Greene draws on a wealth of personal correspondence and other newly available materials to delve into the origins, achievement, and legacy of Kenyon’s poetry and separate the artist’s life story from that of her husband, the award-winning poet Donald Hall.
Impacted by relatives’ depression during her isolated childhood, Kenyon found poetry at college, where writers like Robert Bly encouraged her development. Her graduate school marriage to the middle-aged Hall and subsequent move to New Hampshire had an enormous impact on her life, moods, and creativity. Immersed in poetry, Kenyon wrote about women’s lives, nature, death, mystical experiences, and melancholy--becoming, in her own words
Trade Review
“Dana Greene’s compulsively readable biography of Jane Kenyon tells the poignant story of the poet’s life, her development and career as a writer, and her long marriage to and partnership with poet Donald Hall. Overshadowed for many years, in life and after her death, by her more famous husband, Kenyon emerges in Greene’s narrative as a fiercely independent and gifted artist in her own right. Greene takes pains to illuminate the complex dynamics of their relationship and to showcase the quiet power and beauty of Jane Kenyon’s work, liberating Kenyon from the prevailing mythos that casts her as a lesser poet and enabling readers to see her anew. Jane Kenyon is a triumph.”--Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, author of Flannery O’Connor: Fiction Fired by Faith
"A subtle, sensitive portrait of a 'complex, talented, and ambitious' woman. " --Kirkus
Table of Contents
A Word of Gratitude
Prologue
- Turning Inward
- Enlivened by Poetry
- Donald Hall, “Rockstar”
- Marriage by Default
- House of the Ancestors
- The Community of Wilmot
- The Muses
- Finding Her Way
- A Double Solitude
- Streaming Light and Death
- The Boat of Quiet Hours
- Waiting
- A Moment in Middle Age
- The Coming Evening
- Widening Vision
- The Poet Laureate of Depression
- Poetry Matters
- The Busiest Year
- Deciding to Live
- Annus Horribilis
- “Please Don’t Die”
- Falling into Light
- Aftermath
- Acclaim
- Advocate for the Inner Life
Note on Sources
Notes
Bibliography
Index
