Donald Hall, a celebrated poet and writer rooted in the New Hampshire soil where his ancestors have lived for generations, is a man of profound feeling and spirituality. Having had to face life-threatening illness himself as well as the agonizing death of his wife, Jane Kenyon, also a poet, he knows what it means to have his faith tempered in the fire of suffering.

In his most recent book of poems, entitled simply and poignantly “Without,” Hall describes, in sometimes unsparing detail, the ordeal of his wife and his own suffering with her. For a time, he himself had liver cancer and, two years previously, seemed to be facing the end of his own life. As it turned out, however, his illness passed while her leukemia progressed to its fatal end.

The poems assembled in “Without” amount to one of the most touching portraits of love in marriage that readers will ever see. That Hall is losing his wife to death adds to the ardent physical/spiritual devotion he has toward her. The pain of loss, conveyed here in concrete and familiar, yet beautifully crafted language, reverberates throughout the pages of this prize volume.

“Dying is simple,” she said.
What’s worst is .  .  . the separation.”
When she no longer spoke,
they lay alone together, touching,
and she fixed on him
her beautiful enormous round brown eyes,
shining, unblinking
and passionate with love and dread.

The rituals of spirituality hold great importance for this couple. Here, for example, is the way he describes a pastoral visit from their minister friend:

“When their minister,
Alice Ling, brought communion to the house
or the hospital bed,
or when they held hands as Alice prayed
grace was evident
but not the comfort of mercy or reprieve.
The embodied figure
on the cross still twisted under the sun.

The poet’s distinction between the presence of grace and the absence of mercy or reprieve will strike the sensitive reader as spiritually authentic. So, for the Christian at least, is his reference to the contorted Christ of the crucifixion.

With great tenderness, in the fast diminishing hours, the husband does not shrink from attending to what seem his wife’s irrelevant needs. Then, at the end, he takes care of the last physical service:

For twelve hours
until she died, he kept
scratching Jane Kenyon’s big bony nose.
A sharp, almost sweet
smell began to rose from her open mouth.
He watched her chest go still.
With his thumb he closed her round brown eyes.

Hall’s devotion to his wife does not cease with her burial. Returning from the grave, he makes a “gallery of Janes,” photos showing her at various stages of their marriage.

He also talks to her photographs, four weeks after her death, telling her about his daily activities and the news of friends and writing to her what he calls a “letter with no address.” No wonder he can say to her,

Your presence in this house
is almost as enormous
and painful as your absence.

Sometimes, returning home, he imagines that she is there. His imagination replays events of her death and he counts time from the day of her burial. The earth is alive to him, redolent with memories of the experiences they shared in the twenty years they lived by Eagle Pond.

He visits her grave often, one day three times, and finds that others have left tributes to Jane. Looking out from that site, he fixes on  trees and craves her presence:

I wish you were that birch
rising from the clump behind you
and I the gray oak alongside.

This bereaved yet enspirited  husband recalls the rituals of Advent that Jane celebrated each year – – the windowed calendar and the candles placed in a wreath – – and Christmas when she would read the Gospels over again.

Many more signs of a transforming relationship follow. This is a powerful love indeed that has permeated Donald Hall’s whole being as, it would seem, it had done Jane Kenyon’s.

Grounded in both physicality and spirituality, this is a wholehearted devotion  that, among other things, fully justifies the beloved’s saying in The Song of Solomon: “love is strong as death.”

Richard Griffin