When Jane Kenyon died from leukemia on April 23, 1995, one month short of her 48th birthday, she had lived nearly twenty years in ruralWilmot, New Hampshire, with her husband, poet Donald Hall. "Eagle Pond" had been the home of Hall' s family for generations, and it became the setting from which her mature poetry emerged. The farmhouse and countryside around Wilmot reminded Kenyon of her Michigan childhood before its landscape became paved over and subdivided: "The move to New Hampshire was a restoration of a kind of paradise," she told an interviewer.

Kenyon was born on May 23, 1947, and grew up in an old house "crowded with pictures, books, and music" on the rural outskirts of Ann Arbor, Michigan, home of theUniversity of Michigan. Her parents were freelancers, according to Donald Hall's afterword in Otherwise. Reuel Kenyon was a jazz pianist, and Polly Kenyon a singer, seamstress, and...