SOURCE: Cookson, Sandra. Review of Otherwise: New and Selected Poems by Jane Kenyon. World Literature Today 71, no. 2 (spring 1997): 390-91.

In the following review, Cookson purports that the genius of the simple poems in Otherwise: New and Selected Poems is Kenyon's spark of imagination and her ability to convey the inspiration of their creation with skillfully chosen words.

The poems in Jane Kenyon's collection Otherwise were selected by the poet on her deathbed, with the aid of her husband, the poet and author Donald Hall, as she lay dying of leukemia in 1995. They represent her four published volumes plus twenty new poems, previously uncollected. Illness, her own and that of her father and other relatives she tended with such respect, plays a rather prominent role throughout her verse; it accounts, I suspect, for some of the celebrity she experienced in her last few years, in readings with Hall of...