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.

About the Author
Galway Kinnell was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1927. He made his living mostly from teaching from 1949 to 2005, in France, Iran and Australia as well as at colleges and universities across America. He was Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University for many years, and served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. In 1982 his Selected Poems won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. An updated and expanded edition was published as Selected Poems by Bloodaxe in Britain in 2001. He also published several translations, including books by Goll, Lorca, Rilke and Villon, and Yves Bonnefoy's On the Motion and Immobility of Douve in the Bloodaxe Contemporary French Poets series (1992). His final collection, Strong Is Your Hold, published with an audio CD in 2007 by Bloodaxe, includes his long poem 'When the Towers Fell', a requiem for those who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11 in direct view of his New York apartment. He died in 2014.

Reviews
There are few others writing today in whose work we feel so strongly the full human presence. His language tantalises us with a foretaste of meaning, an underlying emotional logic that recalls Whitman's 'I am the man, I suffer'd, I was there.' Like all good poetry, his finest poems attract and mesmerise us before we really understand them. -- Morris Dickstein * New York Times Book Review. *



Book Information
ISBN 9781852247683
Author Galway Kinnell
Page Count 72
Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publisher Bloodaxe Books Ltd