Collected Poems

by Jane Kenyon

Overview

All of Jane Kenyon's published poems gathered in one definitive collection, now in paperback

Yes, long shadows go out from the bales; and yes, the soul must part from the body:

what else could it do?

—from "Twilight: After Haying"

Jane Kenyon is one of America's most prized contemporary poets. Her previous collection, Otherwise: New and Selected Poems, published just after her death in 1995, has been a favorite among readers, with more than 80,000 copies in print, and is a contemporary classic.

Collected Poems assembles all of Kenyon's published poetry in one book. Included here are the complete poems found in her four previous volumes—From Room to Room, The Boat of Quiet Hours, Let Evening Come, and Constance—as well as the poems that appear in her posthumous volumes Otherwise and A Hundred White Daffodils, four poems never before published in book form, and her translations in Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555974787
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	09/04/2007
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.03(w) x 8.99(h) x 1.09(d)

About the Author

Jane Kenyon is the author of Otherwise: New and Selected Poems and A Hundred White Daffodils. She lived with her husband, Donald Hall, in Wilmot, New Hampshire, until her death in 1995.

Read an Excerpt

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.

Table of Contents

From Room to Room (1978)

1: "Under a Blue Mountain"

For the Night

Leaving Town

From Room to Room

Here

Two Days Alone

The Cold

This Morning

The Thimble

Changes

Finding a Long Gray Hair

Hanging Pictures in Nanny's Room

In Several Colors

The Clothes Pin

2: "Edges of the Map"

The Needle

My Mother

Cleaning the Closet

Ironing Grandmother's Tablecloth

The Box of Beads

3: "Colors"

At a Motel near O'Hare Airport

The First Eight Days of the Beard

Changing Light

The Socks

The Shirt

Starting Therapy

Colors

From the Back Steps

Cages

4: "Afternoon in the House"

At the Feeder

The Circle on the Grass

Falling

Afternoon in the House

Full Moon in Winter

After an Early Frost

Year Day

The Suitor

American Triptych

Now That We Live

The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986)

I: "Walking Along in Late Winter"

Evening at a Country Inn

At the Town Dump

Killing the Plants

The Painters

Back from the City

Deer Season

November Calf

The Beaver Pool in December

Apple Dropping into Deep Early Snow

Drink, Eat, Sleep

Rain in January

Depression in Winter

Bright Sun after Heavy Snow

II: "Mud Season"

The Hermit

The Pond at Dusk

High Water

Evening Sun

Summer 1890: Near the Gulf

Photograph of a Child on a Vermont Hillside

What Came to Me

Main Street: Tilton, New Hampshire

Teacher

Frost Flowers

The Sandy Hole

Depression

Sun and Moon

Whirligigs

February: Thinking of Flowers

Portrait of a Figure Near Water

Mud Season

III: "The Boat of Quiet Hours"

Thinking of Madame Bovary

April Walk

Philosophy in Warm Weather

No Steps

Wash

Inertia

Camp Evergreen

The Appointment

Sick at Summer's End

Along for a Week

The Bat

Siesta: Barbados

Trouble with Math in a One-Room Country School

The Little Boat

IV: "Things"

Song

At the Summer Solstice

Coming Home at Twilight in Late Summer

The Visit

Parents' Weekend: Camp Kenwood

Reading Late of the Death of Keats

Inpatient

Campers Leaving: Summer 1981

Travel: After a Death

Yard Sale

Siesta: Hotel Frattina

After Traveling

Twilight: After Haying

Who

Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks

Things

Let Evening Come (1990)

Three Songs at the End of Summer

After the Hurricane

After Working Long on One Thing

Waking in January before Dawn

Catching Frogs

In the Grove: The Poet at Ten

The Pear

Christmas Away from Home

Taking Down the Tree

Dark Morning: Snow

Small Early Valentine

After the Dinner Party

Leaving Barbados

The Blue Bowl

The Letter

We Let the Boat Drift

Spring Changes

Insomnia

April Chores

The Clearing

Work

Private Beach

At the Spanish Steps in Rome

Waiting

Staying at Grandma's

Church Fair

A Boy Goes into the World

The Three Susans

Learning in the First Grade

At the Public Market Museum: Charleston, South Carolina

Lines for Akhmatova

Heavy Summer Rain

September Garden Party

While We Were Arguing

Dry Winter

On the Aisle

At the Winter Solstice

The Guest

Father and Son

Three Crows

Spring Snow

Ice Out

Going Away

Now Where?

Letter to Alice

After an Illness, Walking the Dog

Wash Day

Geranium

Cultural Exchange

Homesick

Summer: 6:00 a.m.

Walking Notes: Hamden, Connecticut

Last Days

Looking at Stars

At the Dime Store

Let Evening Come

With the Dog at Sunrise

Constance (1993)

I: "The Progress of a Beating Heart"

August Rain, after Haying

The Stroller

The Argument

Biscuit

Not Writing

Windfalls

II: "Tell me how to bear myself . . . "

Having It Out with Melancholy

Litter

Chrysanthemums

Climb

Back

Moving the Frame

Fear of Death Awakens Me

III: "Peonies at Dusk"

Winter Lambs

Not Here

Coats

In Memory of Jack

Insomnia at the Solstice

Peonies at Dusk

The Secret

IV: "Watch Ye, Watch Ye"

Three Small Oranges

A Portion of History

Potato

Sleepers in Jaipur

Gettysburg: July 1, 1863

Pharaoh

Otherwise

Notes from the Other Side

Last Poems in Otherwise (1996) and in A Hundred White Daffodils (1999)

Happiness

Mosaic of the Nativity: Serbia, Winter 1993

Man Eating

Man Waking

Man Sleeping

Cesarean

Surprise

No

Drawing from the Past

The Call

In the Nursing Home

How Like the Sound

Eating the Cookies

Spring Evening

Prognosis

Afternoon at MacDowell

Fat

The Way Things Are in Franklin

Dutch Interiors

Reading Aloud to My Father

Woman, Why Are You Weeping?

The Sick Wife

The Uncollected Poems

What It's Like

Indolence in Early Winter

Breakfast at the Mount Washington Hotel

At the IGA: Franklin, New Hampshire

Translations: Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova (1985)

Index of Poem Titles and First Lines

Editorial Reviews

In a just world, Otherwise—beautifully designed by Graywolf—would become a bestseller.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

From the Publisher

Still, as Otherwise stands as a memorial to the writer's life, Collected Poems is a celebration of the journey the poet took in the development of that life. The new collection follows Kenyon from her first book, From Room to Room, published in 1978, through the last poem she started after her illness had advanced, "The Sick Wife." By reconstructing Kenyon's books in their published versions, Collected Poems provides a complete picture of the poet becoming more confident in her craft and expanding the ambitions of her work.
—The Washington Post

Jon Tribble

It's been ten years since the death of Kenyon, a beloved poet whom every reader might regard as a best friend. Published shortly after her death, Otherwise: New & Selected Poems offered the essential Kenyon. This collection adds 35 poems to give us all her works in a single setting-a powerful testimonial to the trajectory of her career. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal