Let Evening Come Paperback - 2005

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 (TM) 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 (TM) by Elizabeth Bishop) to a blind nursing home resident.