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.
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ReviewsEditorial Review - Kirkus Reviews Copyright (c) VNU Business Media, Inc.
Intimate, excruciating memoir of the life and death of his wife, poet Jane Kenyon, by prolific author Hall.Hall (Willow Temple, 2003, etc.) segments his story into periods of the couple's 23-year marriage, starting from Kenyon's terrible early death from leukemia in April 1995 and reaching back to their first in meeting, in 1969, at the University of Michigan, where Hall taught literature and ...
More Kenyon, more than 20 years younger, was a student and fledgling poet. Most of their married life was spent rustically at the Hall's family farm in Wilmot, N.H., where the two cultivated gardens, wrote poetry, worked freelance and experienced a kind of reclusive solidarity next to each other. Curiously, their harmonious life of poetry was documented only the year before Kenyon's death by Bill Moyers in the PBS broadcast A Life Together. But Kenyon's diagnosis with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) changed everything, and she underwent immediate and devastating chemotherapy, a steady infusion of poisons and drugs through her Hickman incision, intractable pain and enervating side effects, such as dementia and depression, that compounded her existing depression. The prognosis is poor for a woman of 46 (ALL usually strikes children), and Kenyon endured an agonizing bone marrow transplant in Seattle from an anonymous donor (whom Hall later met). For 15 months, the inseparable couple battled the disease raging in Kenyon's blood: Hall depicts their kinship poignantly, sparing few details of human fragility and debilitation. The days of Kenyon's virtual imprisonment inside a sterile cell (her LAF room, for "laminar air flow"), while she was pumped with a steady flow of poisonous Cytoxan, reads like a scene in a death chamber. "Rarely, during LAF, could I do something useful for Jane," Hall laments. In alternating chapters, he portrays the creative, peaceful life the two carved out for themselves, both of them dedicated to their craft. A moving tribute, unsparingly honest. The harrowing close is almost unreadable.
Less References from web pagesMoreThe Best Day The Worst Day; ISBN-10: 0618478019
The Best Day The Worst Day. The Best Day The Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon. by: Donald Hall. ISBN-13/EAN: 9780618478019; $23.00 ISBN-10: 0618478019 ...
www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/ catalog/ titledetail.cfm?titleNumber=689443 Christian Century: Darkness and light: Jane Kenyon's spiritual ...
The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon. By Donald Hall. Houghton Mifflin, 272 pp., $23.00. A Hundred White Daffodils. By Jane Kenyon. ...
findarticles.com/ p/ articles/ mi_m1058/ is_2_123/ ai_n16439616/ print ebscohost Connection: The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane ...
Abstract: The article reviews the book "The Best Day the Worst Day: Life With Jane Kenyon," by Donald Hall. : 151. Accession Number: 19221471 ...
connection.ebscohost.com/ content/ article/ 1041690223.html;jsessionid=4573BDCECBE4AD192BD3F5E1B97FD507.ehctc1 Head Butler - Books
Hall wrote a memoir, The Best Day The Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon, which friends describe as a love story that rips your heart out. ...
www.headbutler.com/ books/ donald_hall.asp Books and Culture's Book of the Week: A Grief Observed - Books ...
Books & Culture's thoughtful editorial reaches readers who want to be challenged to think beyond today's headlines, to dig more deeply into issues and ideas ...
www.christianitytoday.com/ books/ features/ bookwk/ 050613.html Poetry Foundation: The online home of the Poetry Foundation
In 2005, Hall published the memoir The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon. After initiating the book with his account of Kenyon's death, ...
www.poetryfoundation.org/ archive/ poet.html?id=2853 Meditations on the Commonplace - New York Times
In her last five years, the plainspoken Jane Kenyon wrote a number of poems that were deep, transparent and luminous
www.nytimes.com/ 2005/ 11/ 20/ books/ review/ 20goodyear.html Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More - Donald Hall
He has also published several autobiographical works, such as The Best Day The Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon (2005) and Life Work (1993), which won the ...
www.poets.org/ dhall/ Less Places mentioned in this book Maps KML
 | Seattle - Page 176After two months sleeping apart, we occupied a bed together in our Seattle apartment. In the morning Jane sat at the kitchen table to take her pills ...more pages: 3 251 |
| Ann Arbor - Page 15THREE YEARS AFTER we married— we lived in Ann Arbor, where I taught at the University of Michigan — Jane and I decided to camp out for a year at my ...more pages: 24 173 |
| Shenyang - Page 168We were the first American visitors that the USIA had sent to Shenyang, and we were ourselves exotic. Shenyang was a steel city and the air was made ...more pages: 165 167 |
More | Hamden, Connecticut - Page 74Lucy's body would remain in New London, not to be buried until Jane felt well enough to travel to the Whitneyville Cemetery of Hamden, Connecticut, ...more pages: 118 199 |
| Guangzhou - Page 165By train and plane we traveled to other cities: to Xi'an to visit the buried terra-cotta army, to Chengdu and Shanghai and Guangzhou and Shenyang for ...more pages: 167 168 |
| Chengdu - Page 169In Chengdu, where the Szechwan food was extraordinary, there was a rat in our hotel room. In Beijing we visited a park containing the thatched cottage ...more pages: 165 |
| Walled Lake, Michigan - Page 46In 1930 he jammed with Bix Beiderbecke in Walled Lake, Michigan, a wild Prohibition town north of Detroit. His first marriage was childless and ended ... |
| Detroit - Page 46During the war he was performing with a dance band at a hotel in downtown Detroit, where he met Jane's mother Polly, who played cocktail piano and ...more pages: 48 |
| New York - Page 84The movers came to empty our house, and Jane and I drove separately under Lake Erie through Ohio, Pennsylvania, northern New York, and Vermont to New ...more pages: 56 203 |
| Beijing - Page 169In our last Beijing days we found entry to an antiques store and bought an old ginger jar and other relicts of the imperial past. ...more pages: 165 168 |
| Los Angeles - Page 56Shortly after New York we flew to Los Angeles, where I put in some work on the biography. Everything was novel, and a little frightening. ...more pages: 23 |
| Manchester, New Hampshire - Page 27My flight from Charlotte to Boston was delayed and I missed my commuter to Manchester, New Hampshire. From Logan Airport I telephoned Jane to tell her ...more pages: 103 197 |
| Akron - Page 46Then he toured with big bands like Eugene Goldkette's, living out of a suitcase, playing dance halls one night in Cleveland and the next in Akron. ... |
| Allahabad - Page 246She had worn it in a photograph taken in Allahabad, when we had breakfasted in a rich man's garden. She had worn it at the Plaza, the November ...more pages: 173 |
| Hanover - Page 103I talked with radiation oncologists in Seattle; they talked with their counterparts in Hanover. I would rent a car so I could drive Polly across town ...more pages: 27 207 |
| Bombay - Page 175there were memorial services — Indian friends showed the Moyers film, read her poems, and reminisced— in Allahabad, New Delhi, Bombay, and Madras.more pages: 183 244 |
| Cleveland - Page 46Then he toured with big bands like Eugene Goldkette's, living out of a suitcase, playing dance halls one night in Cleveland and the next in Akron. ... |
| Andover - Page 97July Fourth is Andover s big yearly holiday, beginning with a Lions Club breakfast in the school, continuing with a flea market, a parade of horses ...more pages: 21 209 |
| Manchester - Page 212Yet Jane sat beside me calm and easy, as she had sat beside me on the long flight from Seattle to Manchester. At Hitchcock a tech drew blood from her ...more pages: 10 207 |
| Danbury, New Hampshire - Page 17Understanding that many of my correspondents wouldn't believe "Danbury, New Hampshire" sufficient address, I appropriated BCK's invention and ordered ... |
| Boston - Page 27My flight from Charlotte to Boston was delayed and I missed my commuter to Manchester, New Hampshire. From Logan Airport I telephoned Jane to tell her ...more pages: 28 207 |
| Winnetka, Illinois - Page 46Pauline Miller (1913-1995) grew up in Winnetka, Illinois, the daughter of a minister who later left the church and with her mother drifted to ... |
| London - Page 162Only six citizens commuted to London thirty-five miles away, driving tortuous lanes between hedgerows to a British Railways depot. ...more pages: 237 |
| Madison - Page 183I medicated myself with a Diet Coke across Madison. (I remembered another time when I had been calm. We were flying Air India from Bombay to Calcutta ...more pages: 120 160 |
| Sanbornton, New Hampshire - Page 209 |
| Philadelphia - Page 70A condition first identified in Philadelphia in I960, the Philadelphia chromosome, present in certain leukemic cells, causes a peculiar fragmentation, ... |
| Aurora, Nebraska - Page 151Her name was Ronda McCormick, from Aurora, Nebraska; she was forty now, with three children. I asked her if she had been told that Jane was a poet. ... |
| Bradenton - Page 58In March I did a poetry reading in Florida and visited my old Pirate teammates in Bradenton, where they stretched and practiced for the new season. ... |
| Iowa City - Page 173
more pages: 209 |
| Plymouth - Page 227We had given Philippa our old Plymouth 6 when she went to college, a car that had trouble from time to time with its linkages. ...more pages: 19 |
| Cambridge - Page 27A week later I read my poems in Cambridge with Geoffrey Hill. Jane had expected to come with me but stayed home, feeling out of sorts. ...more pages: 14 173 |
| Tokyo - Page 168It was our last city before returning to Beijing and then Tokyo, and it was the most alien or exotic. We were the first American visitors that the ...more pages: 170 |
| Frankfurt - Page 208We taxied from the studio to Logan Airport and flew all night to Frankfurt on our way to New. |
| Pittsburgh - Page 197We landed in Pittsburgh ahead of schedule, met by a young woman with a wheelchair who pushed Jane to the gate for Manchester, New Hampshire. ...more pages: 204 |
| Rome - Page 163had a notion that she would love this country of old paintings and modern design. We touched first on Milan and Florence, then spent a week in Rome.more pages: 164 |
| Port Townsend, Washington - Page 207Tree brought Anne Hirondelle, closest friend from her old life in Port Townsend, Washington, to stand up with her. ... |
| Paris - Page 46Instead he sailed to Europe, where he spent the 1920s playing lejazz hot in Paris and on the Lido; he recorded hundreds of sides in these years, ... |
| Florence - Page 163Jane had a notion that she would love this country of old paintings and modern design. We touched first on Milan and Florence, then spent a week in ...more pages: 164 |
| Virginia, Minnesota - Page 10Then came poets from Cambridge and Boston, from New York and New Haven, Maine, Vermont, Virginia, Minnesota, and New Hampshire: Louis Simpson, ... |
| New Haven - Page 200We sat and visited with Lucy, then in the afternoon Jane left for Alice Mattison s house in New Haven, where the two friends walked and talked. ...more pages: 31 |
| Hyderabad - Page 172On both visits, we went to Bombay, New Delhi, and Madras. On the first visit Jane went to Bangalore while I handled Hyderabad. |
| Kyoto - Page 171We visited Nara with its enormous Buddha, Hiroshima for our guilt, and Kyoto with its gardens and temples. We visited Gary Snyder's room in a ... |
| Franklin, New Hampshire - Page 78In one drawer I recognized a utensil that my mother had told me came from a bridal shower in Franklin, New Hampshire, in 1927. ... |
| Tacoma - Page 125beauty of the room was its tall row of windows giving us downtown Seattle, the southern end of Puget Sound, and highways heading south toward Tacoma. ... |
| Exeter - Page 219Our next clinic appointment had been scheduled for April 4, but we had it changed to the third because on the fourth I needed to drive south to Exeter ... |
| Delhi - Page 209 |
| Charlotte - Page 27My flight from Charlotte to Boston was delayed and I missed my commuter to Manchester, New Hampshire. From Logan Airport I telephoned Jane to tell her ... |
| Albuquerque - Page 207In June Jane climbed Mount Washington; I flew to Albuquerque for a reading; we had dinner in Hanover with Galway Kinnell and Bobbie Bristol; ... |
| Oxford - Page 237I could see old Oxford friends. I could go to the theater and to museums. I arrived in England the day Jane flew to Moscow, and immediately collapsed ...more pages: 166 |
| Norfolk, Virginia - Page 206 |
| Milan - Page 163Jane had a notion that she would love this country of old paintings and modern design. We touched first on Milan and Florence, then spent a week in ... |
| Hong Kong - Page 168Guangzhou was closest to Hong Kong and the West. We stayed in a hotel with an enormous lobby, big enough for a football game, decorated with an ... |
| Miami - Page 209 |
| Chicago - Page 47Chicago nightclubs, some with underworld connections. Her first marriage also ended in divorce. When Polly was eighty I asked her what her first ...more pages: 209 |
| Calcutta - Page 183We were flying Air India from Bombay to Calcutta on a small Airbus, and were almost halfway there when smoke infiltrated the cabin. ... |
| Newport - Page 91Thus we learned of a female kitten, black and white and two months old, available in Newport where the house's new baby had proved allergic to cats. ... |
| Boston, New York - Page 257The public response to Jane's death pleased and distracted me. There were celebrations of her life and work in Boston, New York, and MinncapoUs. |
| Charleston, South Carolina - Page 27On the twenty-ninth I flew to a conference of English teachers in Charleston, South Carolina, lectured on Saturday, and read poems on Sunday. ...more pages: 34 |
| Bristol - Page 137I remember driving to a diner in Bristol one evening for supper. After one beer Jane cried bitterly. At home she curled weeping on the sofa, ... |
| Hartford - Page 199into Massachusetts, past Springfield where traffic began, into Connecticut through Hartford to an exit in Hamden three miles from my mother's house. ... |
| Augusta - Page 90My father's mother was an Augusta, but I think the name had another provenance: I had been reading Gibbon, and I was full of ancient Rome. ... |
| Moscow - Page 237I arrived in England the day Jane flew to Moscow, and immediately collapsed into depression. I did not telephone anyone. ... |
| Charleston - Page 31I read through the letters I had dictated before my trip to Charleston, and added postscripts. I dictated new letters. I slept. ... |
| Shanghai - Page 165By train and plane we traveled to other cities: to Xi'an to visit the buried terra-cotta army, to Chengdu and Shanghai and Guangzhou and Shenyang for ... |
| Hanover, New Hampshire - Page 113In 1993 we read on a Friday in Trivandrum, at the southern tip of India, and three days later in Hanover, New Hampshire. ... |
| Louisville, Kentucky - Page 200But this year, on January 14 we flew to Louisville, Kentucky, to read our poems at Bellarmine College, staying with our friend Bert Hornback. ... |
| Lebanon, New Hampshire - Page 28Foote told her not to wait for my return; she must go to Dartmouth- Hitchcock immediately— the big medical center in Lebanon, New Hampshire, ... |
| Dublin - Page 51My house was near her co-op, and she wrote a note: "When I found out Donald Hall lives 3 houses away I felt like I did when I found that Dublin was a ... |
| Omaha - Page 151She had to go all the way to Omaha twice — early to have vials of blood drawn for further testing; later for the harvest— this woman with three ... |
| Brattleboro - Page 199eating lunch at Todofrali's, and crossed the Connecticut River into Vermont, then drove down I-91 by the river past Brattleboro into Massachusetts, ... |
| Des Moines - Page 209 |
| Minneapolis - Page 209 |
| Ben Tre - Page 96I thought of the American major who reportedly told Peter Arnett, after an assault on Ben Tre in Vietnam, "We had to destroy the village in order to ... |
| Pondicherry - Page 246"The white salwar kameez," I said, a silk she had bought in Pondicherry, in September of 1993, product of Sri Aurobindo's ashram. ...more pages: 173 |
| Madras - Page 175there were memorial services — Indian friends showed the Moyers film, read her poems, and reminisced— in Allahabad, New Delhi, Bombay, and Madras.more pages: 172 |
| Wellington - Page 146Swedish beat out Hitchcock, despite the absence of meatloaf Wellington. The daily meat/veggie/potato plates were varied and copious and boring and ...more pages: 35 |
| Bangalore - Page 172On both visits, we went to Bombay, New Delhi, and Madras. On the first visit Jane went to Bangalore while I handled Hyderabad. |
Popular passagesTO EARTHWARD Love at the lips was touch As sweet as I could bear; And once that seemed too much; I lived on air That crossed me from sweet things The flow of - was it musk From hidden grapevine springs Down hill at dusk? I had the swirl and ache From sprays of honeysuckle That when they're gathered shake Dew on the knuckle. I craved strong sweets, but those Seemed... Page 25 We had to destroy the village in order to save it," the point of which applies to failed domains as well as doomed villages. Page 96 I BELIEVE IN THE MIRACLES OF ART BUT WHAT PRODIGY WILL KEEP YOU SAFE BESIDE ME Most days I wake at five-thirty to work on these poems. Page 258 In November when it turned cold I moved my work into the living room beside the stove, Jane and I occupying chairs on either side. When Jane needed to type a poem, she set up a bridge table beside the Glenwood. We had no storm windows and no insulation. We made love on the floor beside the stove with the drafts open, arranging blankets and pillows. Page 19 When Jane nodded, Philippa spoke with sympathy and left her alone. (You do not try to cheer up depressives; the worst thing you can do is to count their... Page 141 The tricyclic doxepin helped her for three years, the longest stretch without a deep trough. During these years she had her ups and downs, she was sad and she was gay, but doxepin appeared to prevent deep depression. Page 138 Everything was exhilarating that year, and the next, and the next. We kept wondering: Will we ever take things for granted? Will it ever seem normal to live here? Mount Kearsarge changed color over the seasons, pink or green, white or blue or lavender. Page 24 the next thing, the next thing." Often she sank into speechless discontent while I remained energetic, depressive wedded to hypomanic. Page 134 Jane dropped low, she suffered, but she functioned; she wrote poems especially as she climbed out of depression. Her most direct account is "Having It Out with Melancholy. Page 144 Maybe natural selection perpetuates bipolarity because mania or hypomania benefits the whole tribe, inventing the wheel and Balzac's Cousine Bette, while depression harms only the depressive and those close to the depressive. Page 141 LessOther editions | by Donald Hall
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