Jane Kenyon was born in 1947 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, winning a Hopwood Award along the way.

During her lifetime Kenyon published four books of poetry: Constance, Let Evening Come, The Boat of Quiet Hours, and From Room to Room , as well as a book of translation, Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova. She was also a contributor to Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art.

Kenyon’s poems are filled with rural images: light streaming through a hayloft, shorn winter fields. She wrote frequently about wrestling with depression, which plagued her throughout her adult life. The essays collected in A Hundred White Daffodils reveal the important role church came to play in her life once she and her husband – the poet Donald Hall – had settled on Eagle Pond Farm, Hall’s ancestral home in Wilmot, New Hampshire.

In December 1993 Kenyon and Hall were the subject of an Emmy Award-winning Bill Moyers documentary, “A Life Together.” In 1995 Kenyon was named poet laureate of New Hampshire; she died later that year from leukemia, on April 22.

Titles By Jane Kenyon