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Poetry readings: Summer Kitchen
Donald Hall
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Summer Kitchen. This is a poem I wrote after the death of my wife, Jane Kenyon... not immediately after, some years later.
Summer Kitchen
In June's high light, she stood at the sink
With a glass of wine,
And listened for the bobolink,
And crushed garlic, in late sunshine.
I watched her cooking from my chair.
She pressed her lips
together, reached for kitchenware,
And tasted sauce from her fingertips.
"It's ready now. Come on," she said,
"You light the candle."
We ate, and talked, and went to bed,
And slept. It was a miracle.
The 14th US Poet Laureate Donald Hall (1928-2018) was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, then earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1951 and a BLitt, from Oxford in 1953. He published many essays and anthologies of both poetry and prose including String too Short to be Saved: Recollections of Summers on a New England Farm, White Apples and the Taste of Stone, Without: Poems, and Ox-Cart Man, a children's book which won the Caldecott Medal. Hall was editor of the magazine Oxford Poetry, literary editor of Isis, editor of New Poems, and poetry editor of The Paris Review. He won many awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships and a Robert Frost Medal. At the end of his first Oxford year, he also won the university's Newdigate Prize, awarded for his poem Exile.
Title: Poetry readings: "Summer Kitchen"
Listeners: Kendel Currier
Kendel Currier started working for Donald Hall in August of 1994 as his correspondence typist. Later she took on his manuscript typing as well, and in October of 1998 moved 100 meters down the road from Donald and became his personal assistant, adding many various new tasks to her work. As well as working for Donald for the last 10 and-a-half years, Donald Hall and Kendel Currier share a set of great (or for Kendel great-great) grandparents, making them distant cousins and part of a similar New Hampshire heritage.
Tags: June, Summer Kitchen, Jane Kenyon
Duration: 50 seconds
Date story recorded: January 2005
Date story went live: 24 January 2008
