SOURCE: Barber, David. Review of Constance: Poems by Jane Kenyon. Poetry 164, no. 3 (June 1994): 161-64.

In the following review, Barber contends that some of the poems in Constance: Poems feel as if Kenyon is experimenting with, and not quite perfecting, poetry with a larger scope than that of her previous works. Barber observes, however, that other poems in this collection are extremely well written and have strong poetic and emotional impact.

Jane Kenyon possesses one of our day's most scrupulously transparent idioms. Deliberate, fastidious, disarmingly bare of adornments and conceits, her poems' colloquial surfaces can at first seem too artless to contain much in the way of sustaining depth or weight. But modesty of means is not the same thing of course as simplicity of apprehension. Kenyon's resolute absence of affect in articulating local and quotidian instance enables her best work to assume a palpable moral aspect that would...