Strong Is Your Hold

Poems

Galway Kinnell

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN:
  9780544630932
• eBook ISBN:
  9780547348094
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

In this acclaimed poetry volume, the Pulitzer and National Book Award–winner explores lifelong love and the invisible boundary between life and death.

Over his long and prolific career, Galway Kinnell established himself as one of America's greatest and most popular poets. In 2006, after a decade-long pause in creative output, he delivered what would become one of his last and most celebrated collections, Strong Is Your Hold.

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 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.

This eBook edition of Strong Is Your Hold does not include a CD or audio download.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• I
• The Stone Table
• Everyone Was in Love
• It All Comes Back
• Inés on Vacation
• Dinner Party
• Hide-and-Seek 1933
• Conversation
• II
• Ode and Elegy
• Feathering
• Burning the Brush Pile
• Pulling a Nail
• The Quick and the Dead
• III
• When the Towers Fell
• IV
• Middle Path
• How Could She Not
• The Scattering of Evan Jones’ Ashes
• The 26th of December
• Promissory Note
• V
• Shelley
• Sex
• Insomniac
• Field Notes
• Walnut
• Pure Balance
• Why Regret?
• Notes
• About the Author