Jane Kenyon

"Jane Kenyon had a virtually faultless ear. She was an exquisite master of the art of poetry." --Wendell Berry Published twenty-five years after her untimely death, The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon presents the essential work of one of America's most cherished poets--celebrated for her tenacity, spirit, and grace. In their inquisitive explorations and direct language, Jane Kenyon's poems disclose a quiet certainty in the natural world and a lifelong dialogue with her faith and her questioning of it. As a crucial aspect of these beloved poems of companionship, she confronts her struggle with severe depression on its own stark terms. Selected by Kenyon's husband, Donald Hall, just before his death in 2018, The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon collects work from across a life and career that will be, as she writes in one poem, "simply lasting."

Jane Kenyon is one of America's best loved poets. Her previous collection, Otherwise: New & Selected Poems, published just after her death in 1995, has been a favourite among readers, with over 60,000 copies in print and is already considered a contemporary classic. Now at the ten-year anniversary of her death, this volume assembles all of her published poetry in one book. Included here are the complete poems found in her four previous volumes as well as the poems that appear in her posthumous volumes and four poems never before published in book form.

Forest-dweller Maddie Mouse upsets her forest neighbors with her constant tidying. She soon learns that a community works best and is more fun when everyone cooperates and plays together.

Superwoman is alive and well and strutting around in her stilettos, sabotaging our right to an imperfect life. She is feeding our insecurities, she is damaging our self belief, she is sabotaging our businesses, our careers and our relationships and she is NOT a great life model to pass on to our daughters. She is what happens when we buy into the modern myth of ‘having it all’ and she has to go! She empowers us to stay small; shop for things we don’t need; obsess over eternal youth and multi task within an inch of emotional exhaustion on a daily basis. Jane has spent the past 10 years empowering and inspiring thousands of women to step up and shine through her aspirational brand The Well Heeled Divas and has seen far too many Superwomen in meltdown! There is a better place to live. One where your authentic soul is nurtured, your vulnerability is nourished and you are allowed to be you. Controlling everything does not give you power, it gives you a blinding headache! We need to learn to let go, say no, accept help, stop controlling everything, recognise the power of vulnerability and stop beating ourselves up for failing to hit perfect 24/7. This book uncovers how Superwoman is showing up in our professional life, our businesses, our marriages, in our role as mothers, in our attraction strategy and in our identity. It is a call out to women everywhere to be kinder to ourselves and each other and to reclaim our feminine power.

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.

Praised by The New York Times Book Review for her words, with their quiet, rapt force, their pensiveness and wit, [that] come to us from natural speech, from the Bible and hymns, from which she derived the singular psalmlike music that is hers alone.' And The New Yorker that heralds her method of turning 'simple or frankly unbeautiful things sideways and inviting us to see what they offer us to love' encouraging the reader to leave this book in a 'quiet, exalted, shining mood.''

Somber poems deal with the end of summer, winter dawn, travel, mortality, childhood, education, nature and the spiritual aspects of life.