Reviewed by Catherine Parnell
What Clever Friends: The Selected Letters of Jane Kenyon and Alice Mattison
Edited by Chad Wriglesworth
University of Michigan Press
ISBN 978-0472040247, 534 pages, July2026
It’s a wondrous moment when the curtain is drawn back on two esteemed women, revealing their devotion to the life of writing and one another. What Clever Friends: The Selected Letters of Jane Kenyon and Alice Mattison, edited by Chad Wriglesworth does just that. You’ll feel the sweep of love and care, for as Alice Mattison writes in the foreword: “Sometimes friendship is everything.” And thus begins the curated collection of letters between the two writers, both poets, although Mattison expanded her oeuvre to short stories and novels. As she writes Kenyon in August of 1983, “I’m having an affair with another form, Jane—I’ve written nothing but prose since we saw each other.” Throughout their lives of letters, they remain devoted to one another.
The collection begins in the early days of the relationship, when Mattison reads the work of Kenyon, in poet Joyce Peseroff’s literary magazine, Green House. It’s a quick leap from the literary magazine to Alice James books, a women run publishing enterprise in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that focused almost exclusively on women writers. As Wriglesworth notes, “The synergy between Green House, Alice James Books, and a vibrant community of New England–based presses and poets was ultimately what drew Kenyon and Mattison together.”
The women discuss writing (their publications in The New Yorker and elsewhere), teaching, traveling, their husbands and families, and their busy lives. Everything was up for grabs in writing. As Kenyon wrote Mattison in May of 1983, “Wonderful to see the way we each differently chip out a writing life from our various materials.” Commuting from their homes in New Hampshire and Connecticut, they form a workshop with Massachusetts-based Joyce Peseroff and discuss – in person – works in progress.
Writing bon mots are a plenty, and they extend beyond wit. Mattison writes Kenyon (in 1984): “you are a much more organic poet who does not rule out anything in advance but chooses technical devices to suit the particular message or subject of the poem.” There’s humor, too. When she learns Mattison is writing a novel (in 1989), Kenyon writes: “Of course you are writing a novel. I don’t believe it’s a felony.” Later that year, Mattison responds to Kenyon’s advice: “I LOVE what you said about my book. ‘Let it grow in the dark like a mushroom.’ That is so helpful. I do feel a tug to GET MORE DONE, but I am afraid that it won’t be good if it comes too fast.”
Readers will feel the pull of what is rapidly becoming a lost art – letter writing. The sensory pleasure of selecting stationary paper (and they did!), putting pen to paper, folding the paper, slipping it in an envelope, licking and sealing and stamping – a near sacred act in our rapid fire, online age. As a friend wrote, “Everyone has their own idea of the sacred, and, in my experience, everyone knows the sacred when they see it.” What’s truly sacred is the art of friendship and the art. Will readers feel voyeuristic reading the deeply personal thoughts of the women? In keeping with the honesty found in the letters, and, in the aftermath of the book’s publication, Mattison published an essay in LitHub, examining the idea that the publication of the letters was a betrayal, a transgression. Have a look, it’s a sound essay with no holds barred.
But how the metrics of friendship have changed in our digital world as we surf the screen, and how straightforward the women are with relatively little fear of an audience. The letters are not performative, but they acknowledge that some relationships are. As Kenyon wrote Mattison in June of 1982 upon receipt of good publishing news, “I tell you I know who my friends are: when something good happens they’re not mean about it.” And Mattison at one point wisely notes, “Don’t play games with friendship.” When Kenyon writes Mattison in June of 1988, readers feel the prose’s pulse and fire: “I can’t imagine being angry with you, but even if we did get angry over something that wouldn’t mean we’re not friends. I am so afraid of anger—my own and other people’s.” (Would that be so thoughtful in today’s divided world.)
Their acute understanding of friendship’s importance in life fuels the collection, fuels and energizes readers. Kenyon’s and Mattison’s direct prose addressing their love, care and concern for one another outshines social media likes and emojis, but that, of course, relies on the near-outdated notion of relationship intimacy. The letters now live, as Mattison and Wriglesworth note, in university archives, bequeathed by Kenyon’s husband, poet Donald Hall. Mattison kept her letters from Kenyon is a box. Preserved for posterity, as the saying goes. And here we are, beneficiaries of that preservation.
This carefully curated collection of letters celebrates the lives of two extraordinary women in all their complexity. That it concludes with Jane Kenyon’s death leaves readers new to the work of these writers an open door. Come in. See what genuine friendship hath wrought.
About the reviewer: Catherine Parnell is a writer, editor, educator, and the Director of Publicity for Arrowsmith Press. She is co-founder of MicroLit and serves on the board of Wrath-Bearing Tree. Her publications include the memoir The Kingdom of His Will, as well as stories, essays, and reviews and interviews in Arrowsmith Journal, Euonia Review, Reckon Review, Compulsive Reader, Five on the Fifth, LEON Literary Review, Cutleaf, Funicular, Litro, Heavy Feather Review, Mud Season Review, Emerge, Orca, West Trade Review, Tenderly, Cleaver, Free State Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, The Southampton Review, The Baltimore Review, and other literary magazines.