Let Evening Come

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.

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.