A Hundred White Daffodils: Essays, Interviews, the Akhmatova Translations, Newspaper Columns, and One Poem

I originally picked this book up for the Akhmatova translations, but I found the interviews highly informative. Though I am not a published poet (in spite of describing myself as the most spaced out poet on the planet in a few reviews), I have been to Ann Arbor, Michigan and New Hampshire, and I was surprised with how similar some of our experiences have been. I have been to a writing workshop, so it was possible for me to follow the process by which she has shared and refined poems before attempting to have them published. I have also been to church and taken part in discussions in that context, and was not surprised that Jane Kenyon never found the courage to submit the final poem in the book, "Woman, Why Are You Weeping?" to that process. People don't usually talk about `apathy and bafflement' while "waiting/ for the bread and wine of Holy Communion" after having been to India. (pp. 205-09).It would be awful for me to joke about the contents of this book, but I think I found a joke by Jane Kenyon in the article, "Poetry and the Mail," originally published in "The Concord Monitor," 16 August 1993. "All poets share one thing, however--a daily dependence on the mail. `It is joy, and it is pain,' as the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova once said, though not about the mail." (p. 128). The poem itself, "Like a white stone in a deep well," (p. 16) is included in this book. Memory is mentioned in the second line, and in the final line of the poem, and must be what Anna Akhmatova was thinking about, or about "how the gods turned people/ into things, not killing their consciousness." (p. 16)Most of the poems by Kenyon in this book show up in the Interview with Bill Moyers (1993). What I find most modern is the open discussion of depression, crept up on with a question about the melancholy of winter in the poem, "February: Thinking of Flowers." (p. 151). In a poem, "Having it Out with Melancholy," the second part starts with a list of pills that takes up three lines, and I would bet that none of them ever appeared in any book that Freud read. I like the poem "Otherwise" on pages 168-69. The last one in the Moyers interview was "Let Evening Come." (pp. 170-71). I suspect that most of the readers of this book will be serious poets. It is difficult to imagine another group who would be eager to contemplate an article like "The Physics of Long Sticks." The last paragraph of that article is devoted to the question, "Why can't people be more like dogs?" (p. 103).

Jane Kenyon's poetry reawakened my muse and my love of poetry at a time in my life when I sorely needed it. I have read everything of hers I can get my hands on, and when I found this book I was thrilled. It is like sitting down in the living room with her. I always felt so close to her, like she was my friend, and this book almost makes that impossibility possible.

Jane Kenyon is sorely missed; her volumes of published poetry are cherished members of my library. How wonderful to have now a collection of her translations and her occasional prose pieces. She was as observant and trenchant in essays about gardening or hiking as she was in her best verse; this collection is another chance to hear her voice once again. For all her fans, this volume is a must. For those who don't know her work, it might be a good introduction, and it will surely lead them to her published collections which, thankfully, remain in print. A warm tribute to a much-loved writer.