The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon

Donald Hall's celebrated book of poems Without was written for his wife, Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995. Hall returns to this powerful territory in The Best Day the Worst Day, a work of prose that is equally "a work of art, love, and generous genius" (Liz Rosenberg, Boston Globe).

Jane Kenyon was nineteen years younger than Donald Hall and a student poet at the University of Michigan when they met. Hall was her teacher. The Best Day the Worst Day is an intimate record of their twenty-three-year marriage at Eagle Pond Farm — of their shared rituals of writing, close attention to pets and gardening, and love in the afternoon. Hall joyfully records Jane Kenyon's growing power as a poet and the couple's careful accommodations toward each other as writers. This portrait of the inner moods of "the best marriage I know about," as Hall has written, is laid against the stark medical emergency of Jane's leukemia, which ended her life in fifteen months. Hall shares with readers — as if we were one of the grieving neighbors, friends, and relatives — the daily ordeal of Jane's dying, through heartbreaking and generous storytelling.

The Best Day the Worst Day stands alongside Elegy to Iris as a powerful testimony to both loss and love.

"'Jane Kenyon died of leukemia at 7:57 in the morning, April 22, 1995' is the first sentence of this unsparing and beautifully structured memoir. She was only 47, and the struggle was harrowing, but it followed 23 years of an extraordinarily happy marriage between poets, blissful despite the difference in their ages (19 years; she had been his student), and her illness and chronic clinical depression. Alternating with the meticulous account of the progress of Kenyon's disease are warm, joyful chapters as Hall recalls their time together. They lived quietly in a New Hampshire farmhouse that had been in Hall's family for generations, 'the house of poetry, which was also the house of love and grief; the house of solitude and art; the house of Jane's depression and my cancers and Jane's leukemia.' As increasingly famous poets, Hall and Kenyon traveled, on reading tours around America and abroad. Hall's impressions of China, Japan and especially India, which they both loved, make vivid reading. Also glowing are the portraits of friends, relatives and the caregivers who crowded into their lives. Hall wrote about Kenyon's illness and death in his 1998 book of poems, Without, but this heartfelt memoir should reach people who seldom read poetry and could be a natural for reading groups. Agent, Gerald McCauley. (May 1)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Donald Hall's celebrated book of poems "Without" was written for his wife, Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995. Now he returns to this powerful territory in a work of prose that is equally "a work of art, love, and generous genius" (Liz Rosenberg, "Boston Globe").

Donald Hall has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry for The One Day (1989), the Lenore Marshall Award for The Happy Man (1987), the 1990 Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America for Old and New Poems (1990), and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and lives in New Hampshire.