SOURCE: Oktenberg, Adrian. Review of From Room to Room by Jane Kenyon. Ploughshares 8, no. 1 (spring 1982): 168-71.

In the following review, Oktenberg expresses her approval of the simple, straightforward poems in Kenyon's From Room to Room.

Jane Kenyon is apparently translated to New England from Michigan; New England suits her well. Its depressive terrain and weather fit her gusty, solitary moods. Its Puritan heritage, still lived by in those towns, sparks her to spare meditations on the nature of the body, and on living this life. Her first book, From Room to Room, is the most ambitious of this group, conceived of as a body of work and not a collection of disparate poems; it is also the most fully realized.

Her subject is the situation, or the web of circumstances, in which she finds herself. Briefly, the story is this: A woman comes with the man she loves...