Kenyon's first poetry collection, From Room to Room, was published in 1978. It is interesting to contrast the poems in this early volume to the much darker, despairing ones in her later work. Themes in this collection center on the beauty of nature, the tranquility of country life, and gardening, instead of depression, illness, and death.

Maxine Kumin's collection of poems entitled The Long Marriage (2002) addresses her relationship with her husband of more than fifty years along with her "marriage" to poetry and her "marriage" to nature. Like Kenyon, Kumin has spent much of her life in rural New Hampshire. Her poems also deal with personal tragedy but in a remarkably different way from Kenyon's poems.

First-time author Jeffrey Smith's candid memoir called Where the Roots Reach for Water: A Personal and Natural History of Melancholia (1999) is a provocative examination of...