"Bright Unequivocal Eye"

Contents: Bert Hornback: Preface: About Jane Kenyon - Donald Hall: Two Poets in One House - Galway Kinnell: How Could She Not - Joyce Peseroff: Green House - Alice Mattison: "Let It Grow in the Dark Like a Mushroom": Writing with Jane Kenyon - Gregory Orr: Our Lady of Sorrows: Some Thoughts on Jane Kenyon - Paul Breslin: Jane Kenyon's "Manners Toward God": Gratitude and the "Anti-Urge" - Roberta White: "It could be for beauty ...": Poetics in The Boat of Quiet Hours - Lyn Fraser: My Father's Windmill: Daily Grieving in the Poetry of Jane Kenyon - Judith Harris: Vision, Voice, and Soul Making in "Let Evening Come" - Bernadette Dieker: Responsibility to Detail - Becky Edgerton: Attention as a Palliative for Depression: The Poems of Jane Kenyon - Todd F. Davis/Kenneth Womack: Setting into the Light: The Ethics of Grace in the Poetry of Jane Kenyon - Lionel Basney: Trust in Otherwise - Ann Hostetler: Food as Sacrament in the Poetry of Jane Kenyon - Brett Dolenc: Emphasis: The Placement of "Killing the Plants" in The Book of Quiet Hours - Marsha Nourse: The Interior Garden in Jane Kenyon's Poetry - Robert Spirko: Affective Disorders: The Treatment of Emotion in Jane Kenyon's Poetry - Lawrence Kuhar: Optical Allusions and Personal Voices in Jane Kenyon's Poetry - Donald Hall: Letter With No Address Weeds and Peonies - Wendell Berry: Sweetness Preserved - Jack Kelleher: A Bibliographical Checklist.

The Editor: Bert G. Hornback is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and since 1992 has been Professor of English at Bellarmine College in Louisville, Kentucky. He created and directed the distinguished University of Michigan Poetry Series (1968-1977), and organized the First Jane Kenyon Conference at Bellarmine College.

"Jane's most frequently repeated remarks during workshop were 'What clever friends I have. What clever friends I have' and 'The natural object is always the adequate symbol,' which she found in Ezra Pound's 'Make It New' and was the closest thing we had to a group creed...Jane trusted the natural world to provide all the meaning we needed, which doesn't mean that in her own work she always described what she experienced or had always experienced what she described. She looked for concrete, specific images, but became impatient with herself if she thought she was simply writing down what she saw."
(Alice Mattison, "Let It Grow in the Dark Like a Mushroom")
"I think culture invented lyric poetry along with religion and philosophy to help people understand the world, and to discover ordering powers. What's amazing about the personal lyric is that culture gives the individual self the tools...to do the ordering.... [C]ertain poets are not simply poets of survival, but poets of transformation. They've not just expressed and regulated their subjectivity; they've transformed it into values and principles that one can live by."
(Gregory Orr, "Our Lady of Sorrows")
"A true poem, we know, forms itself within hearing. It must live in the ear before it can live in the mind or the heart... Jane Kenyon had a virtually faultless ear. This is what over and over again enabled her to take the risk of plainness, or of apparent plainness. Her ear controls rhythm and sound, and also tone... It is her perfection of tone that makes her poems able to accommodate sudden declarations of spiritual knowledge or religious faith, and that gives so many of her poems the quality of prayer."
(Wendell Berry, "Sweetness Preserved")