SOURCE: Gordon, Emily. “Above an Abyss.” Nation 262, no. 17 (29 April 1996): 29-30.

In the following excerpt, Gordon comments on the various tones and subjects in Otherwise: New and Selected Poems.

For Jane Kenyon violence is, as in nature, inevitable, necessary, even welcome. Kenyon wrote about the seasonal gradations of rural life, where the rustle of leaves is “like so many whispered conversations.” Like the poems of Elizabeth Bishop (one of Kenyon's favorites) and Robert Frost, the poems in Otherwise—twenty new ones as well as selections from her four previous books—are rooted in a sympathetic observation of the physical world.

This is Kenyon's final book, collected just before her death from leukemia at 47. As she told Bill Moyers in a 1994 interview, “There is something in me that will not be snuffed out.” In these testaments to places, like the spot where sun melts snow around a rock, “where something...