Poets Donald Hall (1928 - ) and Jane Kenyon (1947-1995) met in 1969 when Hall taught at the University of Michigan. Kenyon was Hall's student. Hall began courting Kenyon in 1971. They married in 1972. In 1975 Hall, who had taught at Michigan since 1957, quit his job. The couple moved to the New Hampshire farm settled by Hall's great-grandfather in 1865. Hall turned to freelance writing. He is author, now, of thirteen volumes of verse, and author or editor of nineteen anthologies and books of prose. Kenyon, when she and Mr. Hall moved to the farm, continued with poetry, producing four critically praised books. Then in January, 1994, Kenyon learned she had a virulent form of leukemia. She died on April 22, 1995, on the farm where Hall still lives.

Hall's latest collection [Without] falls into two sections. The first section offers poems written during his wife's illness and ending with her death and burial. In the final poem of this section, "Gallery," Hall writes: "Back home from the grave,/behind my desk I made/a gallery of Janes." The book's second section is a series of epistolary poems written to Kenyon after her death. The first of these, "Letter With No Address," comes "four weeks/since you lay on our painted bed/and I closed your eyes." Hall writes, "Your presence in this house/is almost as enormous/and painful as your absence."

Readers who fear poetry as too difficult, too abstract, will find nothing to fear in Without. Hall's poems open themselves generously to the reader. His lines not only make sense, they make music. One wishes only what Hall so obviously wishes, that the occasion for these poems had been anything but what it is — Jane Kenyon's death.

The day before I talked with Mr. Hall, I'd happened to chat with someone who'd been his student during the years previous to Mr. Hall's retirement from academia. She'd said that just about everything important she ever learned about writing and being a writer she learned from Hall. When Mr. Hall and I began our conversation, I mentioned her name to him and her praise of him as a teacher. I could hear in the lilt his voice took the pleasure with which he recalled this former student. About his teaching, he said, "I stopped doing that a long time ago. And I love my life here. And the life of freelance writing."

He talked, then, from a telephone in his farmhouse, about Kenyon. "It was amazing to live with her for 20 years. We moved into this isolated house. She spent two years reading John Keats. She worked on poems every morning. We both did. We lived at opposite ends of the house. We were very good at drawing boundaries and not bugging each other. But when the other one was out of the house, the one left behind felt the absence. During the morning, when we were both writing, we might each come into the kitchen for a cup of coffee. I might pat her bottom but we wouldn't speak. We'd go back to our separate places. We would meet in the kitchen in the middle of the day. There was plenty of contact between us, but we were doing in our different ways, the same thing. And it was tremendously exciting. And we helped each other. Loved each other."

We talked, then, about Mr. Hall's new poems. "The ordering of the poems," he said, "is largely chronological. While Jane was sick, she was in the hospital probably half of the time, and the other half either in this house or in the apartment in Seattle, where, at a nearby hospital she had a bone marrow transplant. I was her caregiver for fifteen months. I did everything I could for her in the hospital and read aloud to her when she could pay attention. When I wasn't taking care of her I was writing. That was the only thing that could take my attention. I wrote a lot of things that were not about Jane. But I also continually wrote about the illness. The first half of this book is largely the narrative, and they were begun close to the events that they describe. And the stories are true. In writing poems, I'm perfectly happy to make things up from time to time. But these were really notes of what happened. So the first half of the book is a partial record of the progress of the disease."

Mr. Hall talked about the book's second section. "The letters I didn't plan. I just began the first letter. Everybody who has lost someone has had the same experience. A few days after the death something happens. You find out a new bit of information. And your first thought is, 'Oh, Jane will like to hear this.' Things happened and I wanted to tell her about them. And at that time, I talked to her at the grave a lot, and I talked to her pictures back here. It wasn't because I thought she was listening, but it just did me good to talk to her. And to write to her, and to address her, and to tell her how I felt and what the weather was like. And what I remembered of our life together.

"I didn't — couldn't — imagine how I could live without writing a book. It was the only reason to get up in the morning. For a solid year, I worked on those letters every morning. That was the reason for being alive.

"Jane's reviewers often used words like 'quiet' and 'simple' for Jane's work until it just drove her nuts. Why? She makes it look easy, right. In the second half of the book, written after she died, it was as if I were writing for two. As if I were learning from her."

I said that in these new poems, I admired the mundane, quotidian detail.

Mr. Hall murmured what I took as agreement, then said, "What was the most beautiful thing in our marriage was when we weren't aware that we were going to die. And we just had our routine. You know you look back on it, and you think, 'Why wasn't I aware of how blissful that was?' But if you'd been aware of how blissful it was you would have been dreading losing it. Anybody who's been through anything like this knows what I mean."

Mr. Hall stopped then for a moment. He seemed to founder. He said that after his wife had been dead for a year, he made himself get rid of her clothes. He said that this was difficult to do, that it was "horrifying." He said, "Let me tell you something that's not in the book that just tears in my heart. When I quit teaching and we moved to this house, critics who have reviewed me in recent years, have tended to say one thing, they say that 'Hall has been publishing for a long time.'" Mr. Hall stopped, explained, "My first book came out in 1955. Then the critics will go on to say, 'But Hall started to get good when he quit teaching and moved with his second wife, Jane Kenyon, to the family farm.' And I feel a little abashed by my old poems, but I do think that all my best work has been written since I came here. I was 47 years old when I quit teaching and we came here, which is the age Jane was when Jane died. Isn't that horrifying? I mean she was infinitely better at the age of 47 than I was at the age of 47. Maybe she would not have gotten better, but you have to think." Perhaps a half minute's silence lay between Mr. Hall and myself, then, before he said, "Otherwise [Kenyon's final collection] is a magnificent book and I shouldn't ask for more. Or, I can't ask, for more."

Copyright © 1998 by Judith Moore.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.