Donald Hall's Without: Poems appeared in 1998, three years after Jane Kenyon's death. The book's title refers to life "without" his wife. It is a sequence of elegiac poems that chronicle Kenyon's diagnosis, illness, and death, even while it gives a glimpse into the unusual marriage of two artists. Most importantly, perhaps, it tells the story of a profound grief. Without finds a prose parallel in A Grief Observed by British writer C. S. Lewis, who lost his wife, Joy Davidman, to cancer. The film version of Lewis's book, Shadowlands became a popular success in the mid-1990's.

Just as Without poetically narrates the end of Kenyon and Hall's life together, Kenyon's first book of poems, From Room to Room (1978) relates the early years of their marriage as she tries to settle into Hall's family home in Wilmot, New Hampshire. Kenyon...