Strong Is Your Hold

Book excerpt: 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.