Customer Reviews

Strong Is Your Hold: Poems

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"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 2000, Galway Kinnell, another poet who draws from life, wrote in the preface to "A New Selected Poems": "For many years, I have felt exasperated by my intractable habit of working at certain poems again and again, over long spans of time. But in recent years I have come to accept that, at least in the case of a complex project, this is simply how I write. It makes me think of the digestive process of a Methuselah-ian ruminant animal, one with many many stomachs, that chews its cud for decades (though I don't want to carry this analogy to its logical alimentary end)." This is a typically earthy expression from a writer who, in the exuberant poem "The Bear," evoked a poetic alter ego stalking with knives in his fists and subsisting on "bear blood alone."

Galway Kinnell has been a MacArthur Fellow and the state poet of Vermont. He has won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and has published several books of translations, including the poetry of Francois Villon and Rainer Maria Rilke. For many years he was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University. He is currently a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

My best friend introduced me to Galway Kinnell with the poem 'The Bear' and I fell in love with this poet. 'Strong Is Your Hold' is the eleventh book of poems by Galway Kinnell. The New York Times has called him a true master poet of his generation. Included also is 'When the Towers Fell', a requiem for those who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11. This book of poems is so special to me. It speaks of relationships; family, lovers, father and child, man and wife, sister and brother, friends, and heroes.

There are 24 remarkable poems in the set and one poem for the ages that will forever stand on its own, 'When The Towers Fall'. The last stanza speaks to me as no others about our fellow man and that terrible day;


In our minds the glassy blocks succumb over and over
slamming down floor by floor into themselves
blowing up as if in reverse, exploding.

downward and rolling downward'
the way, in the days of the gods, a god
might rage through the streets, overtaking the fleeing

As each tower goes down, it concentrates
into itself transforms itself
infinitely slowly into a black hole

infinitesimally small: mass
without space, where each light
each life, put out, lies down within us.

and my favorite poem 'Promissory Note'

If I die before you
which is all but certain
then in the moment
before you will see me
become someone dead
in a transformation
as quick as a shooting Star
I will cross over into you
and ask you too carry
not only your memories
but mine too until you
too lie down and erase us
both together into oblivion.

"He uses spare, natural imagery to explore death and tragedy, as in the solemn ''When the Towers Fell.'' For enthusiasts with Google-era attention spans, Strong Is Your Hold includes a CD of the professorially voiced poet reading the entire collection." EW

'Strong Is Your Hold' is a book of poems to be revered and to read often. It is to be rejoiced, and to remember our relationships as no others. This is a testament to a man who can put into words those feelings that surface when we truly love. Highly Recommended.
prisrob 1/17/06

After more than a decade, Kinnell has written his eleventh book of poetry, the title derived from Walt Whitman's "Last Invocation". Covering a variety of topics, this volume includes a moving requiem for 9/11 "When the Towers Fell", each selection introspective and thought-provoking.

Kinnell plumbs past, present, love, desire and memory, a poet's perception of perfect and imperfect moments:

"Once when we were playing
hide-and-seek and it was time
to go home, the rest gave up...

I remained hidden as a matter
of honor until the moon rose."
(Hide-and-Seek 1933)

Death is a familiar, accepted with a particular grace that comes from many years of living, marking the seasons, the comings and goings of loved ones:

"This morning did she wake
in the dark, almost used up
by her year of pain?

When her room filled
with daylight, how could she not
have slipped under a spell, with him
next to her, his arms around her..."
(How Could She Not: In Memory of Jane Kenyon 1947-1995)

Not feared, but bartered with, death is yet another stage of the process of life, a bridge:

"If I die before you...

I will cross over into you
and ask you to carry
not only your own memories
but mine too until you
too lie down and erase us
both together into oblivion."
(Promissory Note)

The requiem for the unimaginable, (/11, is painful, poignant and forever touched with the images of loss and disbelief, images burned into the nation's psyche:
"In our minds the glassy blocks succumb over and over
slamming down floor by floor into themselves, blowing up as if in reverse...

As each tower goes down it concentrates into itself, transforms itself
Infinitely slowly into a black hole..."
(When the Towers Fell)

A much awaited collection, Strong Is Your Hold does not disappoint. Luan Gaines/2006.

Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Galway Kinnell presents his eleventh poetry collection Strong Is Your Hold, dubbed a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. The free-verse lyrics revolve around topics ranging from love poems and expressions of sexuality to admiration for the natural world; tales of Kinnell's father, children, fellow poets, and personal heroes; to "When the Towers Fell", Kinnell's somber requiem for those who died in the September 11th attacks. An accompanying audio CD of Kinnell reading his own work rounds out this groundbreaking and highly recommended anthology. "When The Towers Fell": [...] // In our minds the glassy blocks succumb over and over, / slamming down floor by floor into themselves, / blowing up as if in reverse, exploding // downward and rolling outward, / the way, in the days of the gods, a god / might rage through the streets, overtaking the fleeing. // As each tower goes down, it concentrates / into itself, transforms itself / infinitely slowly into a black hole // infinitesimally small: mass / without space, where each light, / each life, put out, lies down within us.

Galway Kinnell's latest collection begins with the poem, "The Stone Table" which reflects Kinnell's signature style while also going deeper into terrain he has explored throughout his life's work. The poem places us "Here on the hill behind the house/we sit with our feet up on the edge/of the eight-by-ten stone slab/that was once the floor of the cow pass." From this vantage point, the poet leads us to consider the geography of his poetic icons, "the blackberry thicket," ("Blackberry Eating"); "Freedom," ("Freedom, New Hampshire"); "the bear," ("The Bear") among them. The stone table becomes a resting place that hints at the fourth stanza's meditation on Donald Hall's trip to Jane Kenyon's grave and to closing with the poet's desire to stay on "this earth we attach ourselves to so fiercely."

Strong Is Your Hold is a celebration of our attachment to the world and what it means to be human, as well as a testimony to the past and to our memories. It is not only a masterful work by one of American poetry's giants but provides the kind of reflection or commentary on Kinnell's life themes that make this book critical for any fan of Kinnell's poetry. It is a book in conversation with his other work, with the world of poetry, and with the world. The volume also comes with a CD of the poet reading the poems from the book and anyone who has heard Galway Kinnell read knows that this alone is worth the price of the book.

Beautiful in their directness and clarity, the poems in this volume are nothing to be afraid of. Very accessible by any reader.

You may rather enjoy this book because not only can you hear the poems in your own interior voice, reading silently the pages, but you can pull the CD from the back cover and hear Galway Kinnell's delivery. CD's now are quite cheap to produce and don't add much, if any, to the cost of this 2008 title, Kinnell's llth book of poetry.
Kinnell is a poet of coupled sensuality, which he celebrates in many of these poems, taking his title, "Strong is Your Hold," from another sensual poet, Walt Whitman. The book is dedicated to his younger wife. There is marvelous poem on the painful and tough subject of 9/11, and poems of householder enjoyment, like "Burning the Brush Pile."
Kinnell has the ability to write in clear, simple language that will suddenly move into lyrical phrases or interesting turns of phrase and syntax.

our current societal sensibility frowns upon the depiction of nude children, while applauding any incident, pertaining to a child, hilarious to all witnesses, except the child. with fierce irony, galway kinnell reverses expectations in two poems about his children when they were very young. in Everyone Was in Love, before their parents two siblings appear with snakes draped around their naked bodies. the central impetus for future work is not the image of the twin medusas, but a tiny frog beyond the jaws of a snake. in It All Comes Back, kinnell asks, within the poem, his adult son's permission to publish a moment, hurtful to the child, but funny to family members and late readers.

this collection easily could be entitled `strong is your gaze'. kinnell observes visceral moments with a steady gaze and describes with detailing so meticulous as to leave nothing unsaid. nature, all life, is brutal, a hawk killing a jay, a snake on fire while the poet burns brush, a trapped vole's dying. watching and reflecting on the falling twin towers and the aftermath of the search for the living and the dead, in When the Towers Fell, he evokes the voice of walt whitman:

I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,
I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war...'

and among glaring reportage, kinnell adds to whitman's words a:

...corollary, a small instance in the immense
lineage of the twentieth century's history of violent death--
black men in the South castrated and strung up from trees,
soldiers advancing through mud at ninety thousand dead per mile,
train upon train of boxcars heading eastward shoved full to
the corners with Jews and Roma to be enslaved or gassed,
state murder of twenty, thirty, forty million of its own,
state starvation of a hundred million farmers,
atomic blasts erasing cities off the earth, firebombings the same,
death marches, assassinations, disappearances,
entire countries become rubble, minefields, mass graves.

included in the collection are memorials to friends gone and, speaking of his future demise, a Promissory Note to his wife.

a series of poems of good moments, food, travel, sex, and shared observations given to memory, while the promise of the future is death, leading to a moment in the present, in Why Regret?, of which the poet asks:

Doesn't it outdo the pleasures of the brilliant concert
to wake in the night and find ourselves
holding hands in our sleep?

Galway Kinnell, Strong Is Your Hold (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)

I have to admit that up until now I've never run across a Galway Kinnell poem I've liked. I rather expected to pick this up, skim through it, write a generic bad review, and move on. But it seems Kinnell has (with the exception of one more-of-the-same poem) mellowed out a great deal as he's gotten older and turned his thoughts to interpersonal, rather than global, politics:

"Now beings what could be called
carpenters' arm wrestling, and also,
in this case, transrealmic combat
between father and son.
We clasp right hands (the flared
part of the hammer handle,
his hand) and press right elbows
tot he hemlock (the curved
hammer head, his steel elbow) and pull.
Or rather, I pull, he holds fast, lacking
the writ to drag me down where he lies.
("Pulling a Nail")

Not the kind of thing that seems tailor-made for plastering on a placard and taking down to Washington when marching in a demonstration. And thank heaven for that. When Kinnell focuses his attention on the little things, globally, that mean so much to us on a personal level, he shines. A very pleasant surprise. *** ½

This may be one of the most beautiful poetry collections I have ever had the fortune of coming across and now adding to my extensive library.