Like Russia’s Anna Akhmatova, whom Jane Kenyon translated in 1985 with Vera Sandomirsky
Dunham, Jane Kenyon employs images that create emotional pressure, that are told with such
accuracy that the reader becomes witness to what Kenyon herself has observed.
n an unpublished lecture on “Modern Ireland,” Yeats wrote: “And style, whether of life or literature, comes, I think, from excess, from something over and above utility which wrings the heart.”
While I count my potatoes’ worth,
calculate how much they’ll yield the village,
they widen their space against silence.