Aviya Kushner is the Contributing Editor in Poetry at BarnesandNoble.com and the Poetry Editor o/Neworld Magazine. She is a graduate of the acclaimed creative writing program in poetry atBoston University, where she received the Fitzgerald Award in Translation. Her writing on poetry has appeared in Harvard Review and The Boston Phoenix, and she has served as Poetry Coordinator for AGNI Magazine. She has given readings of her own work throughout the United States, and she teaches at Massachusetts Communications College inBoston. In the following essay, Kushner discusses the factors, such as dialogue and action, that make this poem untypical ofKenyon 's style.

Jane Kenyon is generally a poet of quiet moments, a woman who writes of walks alone with the dog in winter, who details scrubbing floorboards and finding a long gray hair among them. Her poems rarely contain overt action and instead focus on...