Search results for ""Author Galway Kinnell""

Galway Kinnell was one of America's major modern poets. This new selection – drawing on eight collections from What a Kingdom It Was (1960) to Imperfect Thirst (1994) – updated his 1982 Selected Poems, which won him the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. His poetry was always marked by precise, furious intelligence, by rich aural music, by devotion to the things and creatures of the world, and by transformations of every understanding into singing, universal art. These constants appear in a dazzling range of poems: from odes of kinship with nature to realistic evocations of urban life, from religious quest to political statement, from brief imagistic lyrics to extended, complex meditations. This selection shows how the traditional Christian sensibility of his early work gave way to the sacramental, transfiguring dimension of the later poetry, which 'burrows fiercely into the self away from traditional sources of religious authority or even conventional notions of personality' (Richard Gray). As Kinnell once said: 'If you could keep going deeper and deeper, you'd finally not be a person...you'd be a blade of grass or ultimately perhaps a stone. And if a stone could speak, poetry would be its words.' Through the poem, Kinnell throws off the 'sticky infusion' of speech and - like the hunter in his celebrated poem The Bear - becomes one with the natural world, sharing in the primal experiences of birth and death.

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Galway Kinnell is one of America's most important poets. "Strong is Your Hold" is his first new collection since his "Bloodaxe Selected Poems" (2001), which updated his 1982 "Selected Poems", winner of Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. In the citation for the 2003 National Book Award, the judges called Kinnell 'America's preeminent visionary' whose work 'greets each new age with rapture and abundance and sets him at the table with his mentors: Rilke, Whitman, Frost.' The title of his eleventh collection comes from Walt Whitman's 'Last Invocation': 'Strong is your hold, O mortal flesh, / Strong is your hold, O love.' A CD of Galway Kinnell reading all the poems is included with the book. In this striking and varied new book (which was to be the final collection he completed), he 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. There is also anger and sorrow at human destructiveness, and "Strong Is Your Hold" includes "When the Towers Fell", his stunning requiem for those who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11 in direct view of his New York apartment. Kinnell once said: "What troubles me is a sense that so many things lovely and precious in our world seem to be dying out. Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of what's to come" and "Maybe the best we can do is do what we love as best we can". "Strong Is Your Hold" is a powerful testament to Galway Kinnell's loving view of the world.

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This newly assembled volume draws from two books that were originally published in Galway Kinnell's first two decades of writing, WHAT A KINGDOM IT WAS (1960), which included the poem "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World," and FLOWER HERDING ON MOUNT MONADNOCK (1964).Kinnell has revised some of the work in this new edition, and comments on his working method in a prefatory note.

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In a remarkable generation of poets, Galway Kinnell was an acknowledged, true master. From the book-length poem memorialising the grit, beauty, and swarming assertion of immigrant life along a lower Manhattan avenue, to searing poems of human conflict and war, to incandescent reflections on love, family, and the natural world - including 'Blackberry Eating,” 'St. Francis and the Sow,' and “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps” - to the unflinchingly introspective poems of his later life, Kinnell’s work lastingly shaped the consciousness of his age.

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Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016) was a central figure in post-war French culture, with a lifelong fascination with the problems of translation. Language, for him, was a visceral, intensely material element in our existence, and yet the abstract quality of words distorts the immediate, material quality of our contact with the world. This concern with what separates words from an essential truth hidden in objects involved him in wide-ranging philosophical and theological investigations of the spiritual and the sacred. But for all his intellectual drive and rigour, Bonnefoy's poetry is essentially of the concrete and the tangible, and addresses itself to our most familiar and intimate experiences of objects and of each other. In his first book of poetry, published in France in 1953, Bonnefoy reflects on the value and mechanism of language in a series of short variations on the life and death of a much loved woman, Douve. Douve, though, is the French word for a moat, that uncrossable body which separates us from safety and from danger. With this undercurrent at work we read the poems as if they are about the divide between us and death as much as they are about the divide between us and the untouchable reality of text. This is dangerous writing, fulfilling Derrida's "fatal necessity" by making us substitute the textual sign for reality. In his introduction, Timothy Mathews shows how Bonnefoy's poetics are enmeshed with his philosophical, religious and critical thought.

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