Falling Upward

HBVIEW Falling Upward Stephanie Rauschenbusch Collected Poems Jane Kenyon Graywolf Press http://www.graywolfpress.org 376 pages; cloth, $26.00 Jane Kenyon was apoetofreligious ecstasy and dread. In the details ofher New England outlook, she resembles Robert Frost or Emily Dickinson, but she echoes their dark and trembling aspects as well—the Frost of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" (1923) or "Desert Places" (1936), and the Dickinson who knew that, unlike her fellow students at Mt. Holyoke, she had not been "saved." Kenyon's Collected Poems appears to have a narrative structure, encompassing a move to New Hampshire, after which she adapts herself to Donald Hall's ancestral farmhouse, learning to love the mountain views, the local ponds, the stable, the routine of gardening and writing. There are returrt visits to her family, death watches for friends, some churchgoing and attendance at church picnics, the occasional trip to New York, Hawaii, France, or India, and much close observation of her neighbors. But in the aggregate, her poems constitute a search for God in the Book of Nature that Emerson and Margaret Fuller would recognize as a continuation of American Transcendentalism. What makes her tone very different, though, from that of the latter poets—from a poem such as Emerson's "The Rhodora" (1839)—is the way she slices into the plodding accumulation ofcountry details and events in order to situate the significance of each. Note the following lines: "I felt like a hand without an arm"; "Why / is the sound of a spoon on a plate / next door a thing so desolate?"; "I'm falling upward, nothing to hold me down"; and "Astonishing / how even a little violence / eases the mind." Kenyon's depression is as much a character in her poems as anything else, and one becomes quickly attuned to her sensitivity to the seasons and to the many nuances oflight and darkness that she so keenly observes. Sometimes an entire poem, such as "Now Where?," elaborates her sense of being possessed and overmastered by depression: It wakes when I wake, walks when I walk, turns back when I turn back, beating me to the door. It spoils my food and steals my sleep, and mocks me, saying, "Where is your God now?" And so, like a widow, I lie down after supper. If I lie down or sit up it's all the same: the days and nights bear me along. To strangers I must seem alive. Spring comes, summer; cool clear weather; heat, rain.. . . Sometimes it's only the last stanza of a poem that creates such a frisson of dread, as in "Staying at Grandma's," when the grandmother with the "straight and handsome back" and a certain promptness with Bible lessons is figuratively queried: If she loved me why did she say that two women would be grinding at the mill, that God would come out of the clouds when they were least expecting him, choose one to be with him in heaven and leave the other there alone? As one might expect, Kenyon's depression often colors her images. In "February: Thinking of Flowers," witness her observation of a winter field: Now wind torments the field, turning the white surface back on itself, back and back on itself, like an animal licking a wound. Kenyon's depression is as much a character in herpoems as anything else. Often Kenyon muses about the long stretches of rainy days, when the darkness torments her, and when she is propelled out into the weather for relief, as in "High Water": Eight days of rain; the ground refuses more. My neighbors are morose at the village store. I'm sick of holding still, sick of indoors, so I walk through the heavy-headed grasses to watch the river reach for the bridge's wooden planks, bending the lithe swamp maples that grow along the banks. Nothing but trouble comes to mind as I lean over the rusty iron rail. I know of plenty, in detail, that is not my own. I nudge a pebble over the edge. It drops with a thunk into the water— dark, voluminous, and clear, and moving headlong away from here. The...