Without Poems

Three years ago, as cancer destroyed his wife, Jane Kenyon, Hall helped her assemble her last book, Otherwise (1996), which stands with Langston Hughes' great Selected Poems (1959) as a classic of poetic self-presentation. Now he adds to her masterpiece a hard pendant of his own, a collection concerned with her last days, her dying, and his grief. These poems are less brilliant by far than the virtually saltating verse in The Museum of Clear Ideas (1993) and The Old Life (1996). They are near-cruelly blunt about Kenyon's physical deterioration and Hall's own indecorous, raging sadness; for instance, when he recalls an abashing incident while alone for the first time at Christmas--" sick with longing, / I press my penis / into zinc and butcherblock." Many who have lost a mate will recognize this amalgam of lust and despair. They will also feel again that weird weightlessness of the heart when, in the same poem, Hall reports, in a non sequitur, "Yesterday I caught sight of you / in the Kearsarge Mini-Mart." --Ray Olson

A long career in letters, spanning some 40-odd years, has led Hall to this intense collection in which he suffers quite publicly the loss of his wife Jane Kenyon, who died from leukemia in her mid-40s. Compulsive in the details of her long illness, her chemotherapy, her operations, and her deathbed, Hall also writes ten or so letters to her after her death, marking the seasons and holidays with memories, and reports on their dog, cat, relatives, and house. ""Her Long Illness,"" which takes up much of the volume, repeatedly remarks on Kenyon's chemo-induced baldness, and chronicles her bouts of nausea. Hall records Jane's bravery, his own anxious solicitude, and the eventual decision to die at home, days of delusions and incontinence over which Hall lingers. Other poems in this mawkish collection witness the deaths of both their mothers, but the best, ""Without,"" breaks from Hall's monotonous proselike verse into an unpunctuated word-hoard that reflects a year of unpunctuated sorrow. However therapeutic, these embarrassingly maudlin poems further testify to a marriage celebrated by Bill Moyers on PBS, but they have negligible value as art. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.