English Summary/英文概要： Jane Kenyon is considered one of America’s best contemporary poets. Her previous collection, Otherwise: New & Selected Poems, published just after her death in 1995, has been a favorite among readers, with over 60,000 copies in print, and is a contemporary classic. Now at the ten-year anniversary of her death, Kenyon’s Collected Poems assembles all of her published poetry in one book. Included here are the complete poems found in her four previous volumes--From Room to Room, The Boat of Quiet Hours, Let Evening Come, and Constance--as well as the poems that appear in her posthumous volumes Otherwise and A Hundred White Daffodils, four poems never before published in book form, and her translations in Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova.

Awards/获奖情况： From Booklist
The sixteenth-century sonnet allowed some self-disclosure in the context of courtly love, and romanticism licensed philosophical autobiography, as in Wordsworth’s Prelude. But the intimate, even offensive soul-and-body--baring the mid-twentieth-century confessional poets (Robert Lowell is the most famous) introduced was unprecedented; Rimbaud had been more discreet. Every literary convention produces masterpieces, however, and Kenyon’s self-exposition in Otherwise (1996), the big selection of her verse made with the help of her husband, Donald Hall, just before her death, is one. Of course, though often painful, it is hardly offensive. Kenyon suffered severe depression throughout her adult life, and her poems convey the disease’s oppressiveness with humbling power. During her 20 years with Hall, she also found consolation in love and in rural New England’s natural beauty; she movingly communicates that, too. This book presents Kenyon’s four earlier collections, the poems new to Otherwise, and five gathered from other publications in their original order of book publication. It is no replacement for Otherwise, but that book’s admirers will be grateful for its restoration of the masterpiece’s context. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

"In a just world, Otherwise--beautifully designed by Graywolf--would become a bestseller." --Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

“Her words, with their quiet, rapt force, their pensiveness and wit, come to us from natural speech, from the Bible and hymns, from which she derived the singular psalmlike music that is hers alone.” ―New York Times Book Review on Otherwise: New & Selected Poems

“Few poets are as flawlessly down-to-earth as Kenyon: her progress is natural, not affected or rushed. The volume is more than an opus; it is the documentary, the testimony, of a rich human life.” ―Boston Book Review on Otherwise: New & Selected Poems

“This book chronicles the uncertainty of living as culpable, temporary creatures, and catalogues ‘anger, the inner/arsonist’ as well as triumph. We have lost Kenyon, but ‘God does not leave us/comfortless, so let evening come’; Otherwise is proof of that.” ―The Nation on Otherwise: New & Selected Poems

“Kenyon’s poetry is honest and earnest, rich in imagery yet free of clutter. This collection is generous, cohesive and moving.” ―Publishers Weekly, starred review on Otherwise: New & Selected Poems

“Personal, autobiographical lyric poetry is rarely this fine, this clear, this egoless, this moving.” ―Booklist, starred review on Otherwise: New & Selected Poems

“One may also read these precise and limpid works simply for the beauty of their expression, for their insight into the life of a woman prey to depression, obsessed with absence and death, and highly reliant on the natural world as a source of consolation. These are poems of extreme tenderness. . . . In a just world, Otherwise--beautifully designed by Graywolf--would become a bestseller.” ―Washington Post Book World on Otherwise: New & Selected Poems