SOURCE: Gregerson, Linda. Review of The Boat of Quiet Hours by Jane Kenyon. Poetry 151, no. 5 (February 1988): 421-23.

In the following review, Gregerson commends Kenyon's form and control in the poems contained in The Boat of Quiet Hours.

The beauty of repose is a beauty most of us may only fitfully emulate or wistfully, and from a distance, behold. It is the chief beauty of Jane Kenyon's poetry and the informing ground of her vocal and speculative range. She moves, in The Boat of Quiet Hours, through the articulate seasons of her New Hampshire home and through the many modulations of human affection, human grief, the ceremonies of loss and sustenance. She has a good ear: the interplay of syntactical and linear and stanzaic duration, which accounts for so much of the music in free verse, is consistently well-conceived in these poems; the economies that account for so much...