Strong Is Your Hold: Poems

by Galway Kinnell

Overview

The celebrated eleventh book of poems by Galway Kinnell. The book’s title derives from Walt Whitman’s “Last Invocation”: “Strong is your hold O mortal flesh, / Strong is your hold O love.” In this striking collection, Kinnell gives us poems of intermingling with the natural world, love poems and evocations of sexuality, poems about his father, his children, poet friends, poet heroes, and mythic figures. Included also is “When the Towers Fell,” his stunning requiem for those who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11.

Customer Reviews

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547348094
Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date:	04/09/2008
Sold by:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
Sales rank:	175,777
File size:	412 KB

About the Author

GALWAY KINNELL (1927–2014) was a MacArthur Fellow and state poet of Vermont. In 1982 his Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. For many years he was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University, as well as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. For thirty-five years—from The Book of Nightmares to Mortal Acts and, most recently, Strong Is Your Hold—Galway Kinnell enriched American poetry, not only with his poems but also with his teaching and powerful public readings.

Editorial Reviews

This collection will remind everyone why Galway Kinnell is one of America's greatest living poets. There are those who would contend that at age 80 the pace of his work has slowed, but it is clear that neither his skills nor passion have waned. This, his 11th book of poetry, is traditionally Kinnellish in its intelligence, tender in its observations and interpretations, and familiar in its overriding concern with family. And here again, not surprisingly, Kinnell embraces life in its essence, some contemporary Ancient Mariner blessing the sea serpents. "One day, when they were little, Maud and Fergus / appeared in the doorway naked and mirthful, / with a dozen long garter snakes draped over / each of them…" His intimate and thorough knowledge of things as varied as beetles and Shelley is made accessible by his straightforward narrative style, and this entire collection—love poems, speculations on death, even the volume's compelling centerpiece on 9/11, "When the Towers Fell"—is characterized by the ethereal ecstasy so long associated with his poetry. As if this collection itself is not wonder enough, Houghton Mifflin has included a CD of Kinnell reading the entire volume, a treat for any lover of poetry. Though he once asked that none of his awards be mentioned in introducing him, those awards are numerous and well deserved. Any collection of contemporary American poetry is incomplete without the works of Galway Kinnell. Reviewer: Jim Beschta

KLIATT - Jim Beschta