Otherwise: New and Selected Poems Book

Otherwise

I got out of bed on two strong legs.

It might have been otherwise. I ate cereal, sweet milk, ripe, flawless peach. It might have been otherwise.

I took the dog uphill to the birch wood.

All morning I did the work I love.

At noon I lay down with my mate. It might have been otherwise.

We ate dinner together at a table with silver candlesticks. It might have been otherwise.

I slept in a bed in a room with paintings on the walls, and planned another day just like this day.

But one day, I know,

it will be otherwise.

Susan Shapiro

Jane Kenyon was always a quiet poet. Her 1986 collection is called The Boat of Quiet Hours, her poem "Afternoon in the House" begins "It's quiet here. The cats/sprawl, each/in a favored place," and several other poems speak eloquently of silence. Yet if you listen carefully and read between the lines, there's always noise lurking somewhere: bugs, accidents, traumas, storms and an underlying turbulence that makes Kenyon's work darker and more interesting than most New England nature poets. Kenyon's new poetry book, Otherwise, published on the first anniversary of her death from leukemia, includes new poems, sections from her four previous collections and a poignant afterward by her husband, the poet Donald Hall.

Although Kenyon's frequent references to cats, dogs and birds may become tiresome for non animal-lovers, and too many of these poems employ religious imagery that seems pedestrian, the characters in her day-to-day life are engaging, as are the dialogue and details she employs to elucidate her relationship to them. In "Ironing Grandmother's Tablecloth" she tells of visiting her eccentric grandmother, who complains "how my father left poisoned grapefruit on the back/porch at Christmas, how somebody comes at night/to throw stones at the house." In "My Mother," her mother returns from a trip downtown to the dime store: "She is wearing her red shoes with straps across the instep. They fasten with small white buttons, like the eyes of a fish."

Perhaps the most interesting and complex character is Kenyon's own depression, often personified and omnipresent. "Having It Out With Melancholy" reads like an argument: "Suggestion From a Friend: You wouldn't be so depressed/if you really believed in God." Yet this is a poet who can also write that "Happiness is the uncle you never/knew about, who flies a single-engine plane/onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes/into town, and inquires at every door/until he finds you asleep midafternoon." Indeed, Otherwise is not without its transcendent moments of joy. -- Salon