Donald Hall's celebrated book of poems Without was written for his wife, Jane Kenyon, who died in 1995.Hall returns to this powerful territory in The Best Day the Worst Day, a work of prose that is equally "a work of art, love, and generous genius" (Liz Rosenberg, Boston Globe).
Jane Kenyon was nineteen years younger than Donald Hall and a student poet at the University of Michigan when they met.Hall was her teacher.The Best Day the Worst Day is an intimate account of their twenty-three-year marriage, nearly all of it spent in New Hampshire at Eagle Pond Farm - of their shared rituals of writing, close attention to pets and gardening, and love in the afternoon.Hall joyfully records Jane's growing power as a poet and the couple's careful accommodations toward each other as writers.This portrait of the inner moods of "the best marriage I know about," as Hall has written, is laid against the stark medical emergency of Jane's leukemia, which ended her life in fifteen months.Hall shares with readers - as if we were one of the grieving neighbors, friends, and relatives - the daily ordeal of Jane's dying, through heartbreaking and generous storytelling.
The Best Day the Worst Day stands alongside Elegy to Iris as a powerful testimony to both loss and love.
