From Room To Room
 9781938584619, 1938584619

Table of contents :
1. UNDER A BLUE MOUNTAIN
For the Night
Leaving Town
From Room to Room
Here
Two Days Alone
The Cold
This Morning
The Thimble
Changes
Finding a Long Gray Hair
Hanging Pictures in Nanny's Room
In Several Colors
The Clothes Pin
2. EDGES OF THE MAP
The Needle
My Mother
Cleaning the Closet
Ironing Granmother's Tablecloth
The Box of Beads
3. COLORS
At a Motel Near O'Hare Airport
The First Eight Days of the Beard
Changing Light
The Socks
The Shirt
Starting Therapy
Colors
From the Back Steps
Cages
4. Afternoon in the House. At the Feeder The Circle on the Grass
Falling
Afternoon in the House
Full Moon in Winter
After an Early Frost
Year Day
The Suitor
American Triptych
Now That We Live
5. Six Poems from Anna Akhmatova
The memory of sun sickness in my heart ...
I know, I Know the skis ...
Everything promised him to me ...
Like a white stone in a deep well ...
Along the hard crest of the snowdrift ...
A land not mine, still ...

Citation preview

© 2016 by Jane Kenyon All rights reserved Alice James Books are published by Alice James Poetry Cooperative, Inc., an affiliate of the University of Maine at Farmington. Alice James Books 114 Prescott Street Farmington, ME 04938 www.alicejamesbooks.org eISBN: 978-1-938584-61-9

Some of these poems first appeared in magazines and anthologies. I would like to thank their editors for permission to reprint: The American Poetry Review, Anaesthesia Review, Blair & Ketchtum’s Country Journal, Good Company: Poets at Michigan, Green House, Harvard Magazine, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Nation, The Paris Review, Stone Drum, The Third Coast: Contemporary Michigan Poetry, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. Cover drawing by George Schneeman. Special thanks to Nannette Woodcock at New Hampshire Composition, where the book was typeset, and to Doug Munson, who designed the cover. I want to thank Lou Teel for helping me with Anna Akhmatova’s poems. The first printing of this book was supported by a grant from the Massachusetts Council for the At1s and Humanities.

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Alice James Books has been publishing poetry since 1973. The press was founded in Boston, Massachusetts as a cooperative wherein authors performed the day-to-day undertakings of the press. This collaborative element remains viable even today, as authors who publish with the press are also invited to become members of the editorial board and participate in editorial decisions at the press. The editorial board selects manuscripts for publication via the press’s annual, national competition, the Alice James Award. Alice James Books seeks to support women writers and was named for Alice James, sister to William and Henry, whose extraordinary gift for writing went unrecognized during her lifetime.