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.

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 twentythree-year marriage, nearly all of it spent in New Hampshire at Eagle

Pond Farm—of their shared rituals of writing, close attention to pets and

gardening, and love in the afternoon. Hall joyfully records 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 the daily ordeal of Jane's dying, through heartbreaking but ultimately inspiring storytelling.

A candid memoir of love, art, and grief from a celebrated man of letters, United States poet laureate Donald Hall

In an intimate record of his twenty-three-year marriage to poet Jane Kenyon, Donald Hall recounts the rich pleasures and the unforeseen trials of their shared life. The couple made a home at their New England farmhouse, where they rejoiced in rituals of writing, gardening, caring for pets, and connecting with their rural community through friends and church. The Best Day the Worst Day presents a portrait of the inner moods of "the best marriage I know about," as Hall has written, against the stark medical emergency of Jane's leukemia, which ended her life in fifteen months. Between recollections of better times, Hall shares with readers the daily ordeal of Jane's dying through heartbreaking but ultimately inspiring storytelling.

Donald Hall is the fourteenth poet laureate of the United States and the authorof more than two dozen books of poems and prose, including White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 19462006. His work has garnered many honors, among them the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry for The One Day; the Lenore Marshall Award for The Happy Man; the Robert Frost Silver Medal from the Poetry Society of America for Old and New Poems; and the prestigious Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in recognition of his lifetime accomplishments. His poetry collection Without, which was written for Jane Kenyon during and after her illness, received the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Hall continues to inhabit the New Hampshire farmhouse where he and Jane Kenyon lived together.