SOURCE: Unterecker, John. “Shape-Changing in Contemporary Poetry.” Michigan Quarterly Review 27, no. 3 (summer 1988): 490-92.

In the following excerpt, Unterecker notes the difference between Kenyon's first collection, From Room to Room, and her second, The Boat of Quiet Hours, concerning her feelings of belonging in her New England home and community. Unterecker also compares Kenyon's intellectual clarity with that of John Keats.

Jane Kenyon's second book, The Boat of Quiet Hours, is a significant development over From Room to Room (1978), itself a most eloquent statement of the uneasinesses and uncertainties of a woman who leaves the security of her own family (“My people are not here, my mother / and father, my brother. I talk / to the cats about weather.”) for a house filled with “five generations” of a husband's family's memorabilia. (She feels clumsy “… among photographs / of your ancestors, their hymnbooks and old / shoes.”)

The world of the first book...