Taking down the Tree by Jane Kenyon Read by Sue Ellen Thompson

Taking Down the Tree by Jane Kenyon

The poet Jane Kenyon, born in 1947, married her college poetry professor, Donald Hall, before moving to his family’s ancestral farm in New Hampshire. The two poets lived and wrote there for 20 years, during which they were beset by a series of illnesses and medical crises. Kenyon published only four books before dying of leukemia at the age of 47, but she is widely recognized today as one of America’s premier lyric poets. Although she struggled with depression throughout her life, this poem brings a message of hope.

Sue Ellen Thompson, of Oxford, MD, is the first “featured writer” in the Delmarva Review. Among her published works, a sixth book of poems, SEA NETTLES: NEW & SELECTED POEMS, was published in 2022. She has been an instructor at The Writer’s Center, in Bethesda, since 2007, and has previously taught at Middlebury College, Binghamton University, the University of Delaware, and Central Connecticut State University. She received the 2010 Maryland Author Award from the Maryland Library Association.