SOURCE: Baker, David. “Culture, Inclusion, Craft.” Poetry 158, no. 3 (June 1991): 161-64.

In the following excerpt, Baker laments that, aside from a handful of quality poems, most of the verse in Let Evening Come is terse and redundant—which he finds disappointing, considering the quality of Kenyon's previously published poems.

If Goldbarth's multiverse is rapidly expanding, blasting outward, then the universe of Jane Kenyon's Let Evening Come is undergoing a severe contraction, a collapse, a falling inward toward density and gravity. It's a poetry common to the minimal, primitivist impulses of the past three decades. Even while I acclaim the noises of cultural inclusion in contemporary poetry, I want to continue also to find solace and beauty in plainness, in solitude. Unfortunately, Kenyon too seldom raises her private, spare utterances to the conditions that, I believe, the plain style aspires to—prayer, song, grace.

In her best poems, Kenyon documents...