Let Evening Come

Jane Kenyon has made something of an aesthetic of quiet, and her poems have a brooding introversion. Rare among American poets she is also able to infuse her poetry with a lightly worn sense of Christian humility, and an active – if worried – sense of mercy. These are among the qualities which give her verse both the tones and the turns of serious prayer. Within the subtle yet dramatic use of rhyme and sound in Let Evening Come, she evokes not only the drama of her need to speak, but also the deep communion and solace within any reader’s need to listen. -- Liam Rector * Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry *
Her words, with their quiet, rapt force, their pensiveness and wit, come to us from natural speech, from the Bible and hymns, from which she derived the singular psalmlike music that is hers alone. * New York Times Book Review *
If Sylvia Plath was Our Lady of the Rages, Jane was Our Lady of the Sorrows, Our Lady of Vulnerability. -- Gregory Orr