SOURCE: Merritt, Constance. Review of Otherwise: New and Selected Poems by Jane Kenyon. Prairie Schooner 72, no. 1 (spring 1998): 171-76.

In the following excerpt, Merritt analyzes the poems collected in Otherwise: New and Selected Poems and notes Kenyon's preoccupation with death and dying. However, Merritt asserts, this morbidity is tempered by Kenyon's reverence for the common, everyday realities that make up human existence.

Although her name does not appear among those “certain authors” that Donald Hall, in his afterword to Kenyon's posthumously published New & Selected Poems, tells us she “read and reread … with excitement and devotion” (Keats, Akhmatova, Bishop, Chekhov), Emily Dickinson is no less a presence here. Beyond shared themes—death, depression, hard grappling with God—and a shared subject matter—daily domestic life in a New England village, intimacies with flowers, beasts, and birds, the cycle of the seasons, of daylight and darkness, and companionable rambles with a...