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The Collected Poems
"This volume may be the best that America has to offer today. Buy this book, read it, treasure it."― Philadelphia Inquirer The early poems, long unavailable in any edition, sound themes that have always engaged Kunitz: life's meaning, the relation of time to eternity, kinship with nature, and loss, most poignantly that of his father. But despite the power of his poems about loss, Kunitz remains ardent in celebrating life. He fully lives up to his own advice to younger poets "to persevere, then explore. Be explorers all your life."
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
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857 people want to read
About the author
Stanley Kunitz
85 books80 followersStanley Jasspon Kunitz was an American poet. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress twice, first in 1974 and then again in 2000.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 51 reviews
December 1, 2012
He who is a fierce young crier
Of poems will be tranquil as water.
My dear GR friend (and fellow-dork) Patty recommended the poetry of Robert Hass to me. Stanley Kunitz wrote the introduction to Hass's Field Guide. Kunitz's effusive praise of Hass made me both want to read Field Guide and had me in search of Kunitz's own work. Kunitz's introduction alone revealed the heart of poet. How many introductions can do that?
I looked forward to reading Field Guide and then moving on to Kunitz's Collected Poems. I received both collections from the library within days of one another. I dipped into Hass's poems and found them not quite suitable to my taste. I then decided to dig into Kunitz's Collected Poems. The back cover alone made me realize I had something special in my hands:
"The poem comes in the form of a blessing--'like rapture breaking on the mind,' as I tried to phrase it in my youth. Through the years I have found this gift of poetry to be life-sustaining, life-enhancing, and absolutely unpredictable. Does one live, therefore, for the sake of poetry? No, the reverse is true: Poetry is for the sake of the life."
Kunitz was 100 years old when he died. His published poetry spanned 75 of those years. He was an elder statesman of American Poetics. Those years and wisdom allowed him to make such bold statements as "Poetry is for the sake of life."
The collected poems gathers his life's passion from his first collection (Intellectual Things, 1930) to the beautiful "Reflections" written for these collected poems (2000) and 6 other collections of his poems. Kunitz was not a prolific writer for one whose career stretched 3/4 of a century. His work is, however, consistently brilliant and engrossing.
Kunitz spoke to me from a distance in Hass's introduction, beckoned to me on the back of this collection, grabbed hold of me with the opening reflections, and then alternately shook me and embraced me for the remainder of this amazing body of work. Throughout the collected poems I became acquainted with a soul who is immeasurably wise, deeply interested in and fascinated by the human condition, and who spoke to every aspect of my development as a man and a human being in a way that less than a handful of authors or poets ever have.
The first night I began reading the poems, I sat in bed with my wife and read the reflections to her. Perhaps it was due to us both being sleepy and in the right place, but every line seemed to resonate and put us in a collective awe.
From: Reflections--
"Years ago I came to the realization that the most poignant of all lyric tensions stems from the awareness that we are living and dying at once. To embrace such knowledge and yet to remain compassionate and whole--that is the consummation of the endeavor of art."
"Poems would be easy if our heads weren't so full of the day's clatter. The task is to get through to the other side, where we can hear the deep rhythms that connect us with the stars and the tides."
"Sometimes I feel ashamed that I've written so few poems on political themes, on the causes that agitate me. But then I remind myself that to choose to live as a poet in the modern superstate is in itself a political action."
“A badly made thing falls apart. It takes only a few years for most of the energy to leak out of a defective work of art. To put it simply, conservation of energy is a function of form.”
---
Nothing within these pages is badly made. This is a body of work that should last many years.
Reading the reviews of others I learned that many people were put off by Kunitz's early work. Many people commented that his first collection of poems was too stilted and lacks connection with reality. I worried that reading his reflections as a wise old poet and then moving back to his early years would be jarring and would lack the flow I initially read. This worry was unwarranted. I love his early poems, perhaps most of all. His first collection (Intellectual Things, 1930) is replete with gems. The next group (Passport to the War) are grittier, darker, and more wrenching, but they seem to lack some of the wonder of the first book. The latter reflect the darkness of the era.
With each subsequent stage, there is change. There is less reliance on a rhyme scheme as the years progressed. I have to say though that Kunitz's rhythm, imagery, and wisdom coupled with the early rhymes pack a punch that do not feel sing-songy in any manner.
I devoured this collection because I wanted to read it all at once. I wanted to inhale it and make it as much a part of me as my breath. I usually like to linger and savor poems, but these felt more like pieces of me that were lost and needed to be reclaimed more than something I found anew.
Kunitz's poetry feels like returning to the place that is your solace as well as your home base for adventure. It is simply a collection that feels like it was written for me and yet has so much universality that I think many people would feel that same sense of personalization.
Stanley Kunitz's body of work reminds of a Neil Young song.
There is a town in North Ontario
Dream comfort memory to spare
And in my mind I still need a place to go
All my changes were there . . .
We were Helpless, helpless, helpless, helpless
His poetry often traces the line of transformation and changes that we encounter just in being human. His early work does so with inspiration from John Donne and his later from his own life. He even self-reflects to his earlier poems in a manner that is somehow admirable and endearing more than narcissistic--perhaps one is permitted this when one's poetic life alone spans nearly 80 years. Regardless, the changes Kunitz marks somehow trace my own changes, both those I have already endured and those, oddly enough, which I have to look forward. I can only explain the resonance of changes not yet occurred as something imbued deeply into the human condition.
Regardless, when speaking of this collection, all my changes were there and I am simply helpless to the charms and beauty of this body of work.
Other endorsements:
After finishing the first section of poems (Intellectual Things, 1930), I knew that this was a collection that would be important to me until I return the dust I borrowed to exist in this world--to mangle one of S.K.'s phrases. As a result, I ordered The Collected Poems so that I would have it ASAP and thereafter. It has arrived and would be placed on my special black shelf that holds my essentials and favorites, but it is currently residing by my bed so I may read a poem or two before drifting off.
This collection has instantly moved to my "essential shelf" and will be read throughout my life.
I have always referred to only one person as S.K in the past. He being the Great Dane (no, not Scooby Doo), Soren Kierkegaard. Stanley Kunitz and the great sensei Steve Kendall are my two newest and highest ranking S.K.s.
I don't know that any of Mr. Kunitz's poems will resonate with anyone as much as they have with me. One of the mysteries and joys of why we read is to uncover gems that shine for us and to breathe new air that revives our souls. He speaks to me. More than that I cannot say.
From: Intellectual Things (1930)--
Transformation
All night he ran, his body was air,
But that was in another year.
Lately the answered shape of his laughter,
The shape of his smallest word, is fire.
He who is a fierce young crier
Of poems will be tranquil as water,
Keeping, in sunset glow, the pure
Image of limitless desire;
Then enter earth and come to be,
Inch by inch, geography.
--------
So Intricately Is This World Resolved
So intricately is this world resolved
Of substance arched on thrust of cicumstance,
The earth's organic meaning so involved
That none may break the pattern of his dance;
Lest, deviating, he confound the line
Of reason with the destiny of race,
And, altering the perilous design,
Bring ruin like a rain on time and space.
Lover, it is good to lie in the sweet grass
With a dove-soft nimble girl. But O lover,
Lift no destroying hand; let fortune pass
Unchallenged, beauty sleep; dare not to cover
Her mouth with kisses by the garden wall,
Lest, cracking in bright air, a planet fall.
--------
The Words of the Preacher
Taking infection from the vulgar air
And sick with the extravagant disease
Of life, my soul rejected the sweet snare
Of happiness; declined
That democratic bait, set in the world
By fortune's old and mediocre mind.
To love a changing shape with perfect faith
Is a waste of faith; to follow dying things
With deathless hope is vain; to go from breath
To breath, so to be fed
And put to sleep, is cheat and shame--because
By piecemeal living a man in doomed, I said.
For time with clever fingers ties the knot
Of life that is extended like a rope,
And bundling up the spinning of our though
(The ribbons and the lace
That might have made a garment for the wind),
Constricts our substance to a cipher's space.
Into the middle of my thought I crept
And on the bosom of the angel lay,
Lived all my life at once; and oh I wept
At what I could foresee;
Upon his death-soft burning plumage wept
To vie with God for His eternity.
-----
The Change
Dissolving in the chemic vat
Of time, man (gristle and fat),
Corrupting on a rock in space
That crumbles, lifts his impermanent face
To watch the stars, his brain locked tight
Against the tall revolving night.
Yet is he neither here nor there
Because tomorrow comes again
Foreshadowed, and the ragged wing
Of yesterday's remembering
Cuts sharply the immediate moon;
Nor is he always; late and soon
Becoming, never being, till
Becoming is a being still.
Here, Now, and Always, man would be
Inviolate eternally:
This is his spirit's trinity.
------
From: Passport to War (1944)--
(After the bombing of Pearl Harbor)
The Last Picnic
The guests in their summer colors have fled
Through field and hedgerow. Come, let’s pick
The bones and feathers of our fun
And kill the fire with a savage stick.
The figures of our country play,
The mocking dancers, in a swirl
Of laughter waved from the evening’s edge,
Wrote finis to a pastoral.
Now the tongue of the military man,
Summoning the violent,
Calls the wild dogs out of their holes
And the deep Indian from his tent,
Not to be tamed, not to be stamped
Under. Earth-faced, behind this grove,
Our failures creep with soldier hearts,
Pointing their guns at what we love.
When they shall paint our sockets gray
And light us like a stinking fuse,
Remember that we once could say,
Yesterday we had a world to lose.
--------------
From: Garland, Danger
End of Summer
An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.
I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones,
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.
Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part of my life was over.
Already the iron door of the north
Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their populations forth,
And a cruel wind blows.
---
From: Passing Through-The Later Poems:
Excerpt from Proteus:
From Proteus:
He was the world's supreme illusionist
taught by necessity how to melt his cage,
slipping at will through his adversaries' grasp
by self-denial, displaying one by one
his famous repertoire of shifting forms,
from lion and serpent to fire and waterfall.
But now he was heavy in his heart and languid,
sensing the time had come to leave his flock.
Must he prepare himself once more for the test?
He could not recollect the secret codes
that gave him access to his other lives.
-------
more here:
http://stanleykunitzpoetry.blogspot.com/
About SK:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/s...
Of poems will be tranquil as water.
My dear GR friend (and fellow-dork) Patty recommended the poetry of Robert Hass to me. Stanley Kunitz wrote the introduction to Hass's Field Guide. Kunitz's effusive praise of Hass made me both want to read Field Guide and had me in search of Kunitz's own work. Kunitz's introduction alone revealed the heart of poet. How many introductions can do that?
I looked forward to reading Field Guide and then moving on to Kunitz's Collected Poems. I received both collections from the library within days of one another. I dipped into Hass's poems and found them not quite suitable to my taste. I then decided to dig into Kunitz's Collected Poems. The back cover alone made me realize I had something special in my hands:
"The poem comes in the form of a blessing--'like rapture breaking on the mind,' as I tried to phrase it in my youth. Through the years I have found this gift of poetry to be life-sustaining, life-enhancing, and absolutely unpredictable. Does one live, therefore, for the sake of poetry? No, the reverse is true: Poetry is for the sake of the life."
Kunitz was 100 years old when he died. His published poetry spanned 75 of those years. He was an elder statesman of American Poetics. Those years and wisdom allowed him to make such bold statements as "Poetry is for the sake of life."
The collected poems gathers his life's passion from his first collection (Intellectual Things, 1930) to the beautiful "Reflections" written for these collected poems (2000) and 6 other collections of his poems. Kunitz was not a prolific writer for one whose career stretched 3/4 of a century. His work is, however, consistently brilliant and engrossing.
Kunitz spoke to me from a distance in Hass's introduction, beckoned to me on the back of this collection, grabbed hold of me with the opening reflections, and then alternately shook me and embraced me for the remainder of this amazing body of work. Throughout the collected poems I became acquainted with a soul who is immeasurably wise, deeply interested in and fascinated by the human condition, and who spoke to every aspect of my development as a man and a human being in a way that less than a handful of authors or poets ever have.
The first night I began reading the poems, I sat in bed with my wife and read the reflections to her. Perhaps it was due to us both being sleepy and in the right place, but every line seemed to resonate and put us in a collective awe.
From: Reflections--
"Years ago I came to the realization that the most poignant of all lyric tensions stems from the awareness that we are living and dying at once. To embrace such knowledge and yet to remain compassionate and whole--that is the consummation of the endeavor of art."
"Poems would be easy if our heads weren't so full of the day's clatter. The task is to get through to the other side, where we can hear the deep rhythms that connect us with the stars and the tides."
"Sometimes I feel ashamed that I've written so few poems on political themes, on the causes that agitate me. But then I remind myself that to choose to live as a poet in the modern superstate is in itself a political action."
“A badly made thing falls apart. It takes only a few years for most of the energy to leak out of a defective work of art. To put it simply, conservation of energy is a function of form.”
---
Nothing within these pages is badly made. This is a body of work that should last many years.
Reading the reviews of others I learned that many people were put off by Kunitz's early work. Many people commented that his first collection of poems was too stilted and lacks connection with reality. I worried that reading his reflections as a wise old poet and then moving back to his early years would be jarring and would lack the flow I initially read. This worry was unwarranted. I love his early poems, perhaps most of all. His first collection (Intellectual Things, 1930) is replete with gems. The next group (Passport to the War) are grittier, darker, and more wrenching, but they seem to lack some of the wonder of the first book. The latter reflect the darkness of the era.
With each subsequent stage, there is change. There is less reliance on a rhyme scheme as the years progressed. I have to say though that Kunitz's rhythm, imagery, and wisdom coupled with the early rhymes pack a punch that do not feel sing-songy in any manner.
I devoured this collection because I wanted to read it all at once. I wanted to inhale it and make it as much a part of me as my breath. I usually like to linger and savor poems, but these felt more like pieces of me that were lost and needed to be reclaimed more than something I found anew.
Kunitz's poetry feels like returning to the place that is your solace as well as your home base for adventure. It is simply a collection that feels like it was written for me and yet has so much universality that I think many people would feel that same sense of personalization.
Stanley Kunitz's body of work reminds of a Neil Young song.
There is a town in North Ontario
Dream comfort memory to spare
And in my mind I still need a place to go
All my changes were there . . .
We were Helpless, helpless, helpless, helpless
His poetry often traces the line of transformation and changes that we encounter just in being human. His early work does so with inspiration from John Donne and his later from his own life. He even self-reflects to his earlier poems in a manner that is somehow admirable and endearing more than narcissistic--perhaps one is permitted this when one's poetic life alone spans nearly 80 years. Regardless, the changes Kunitz marks somehow trace my own changes, both those I have already endured and those, oddly enough, which I have to look forward. I can only explain the resonance of changes not yet occurred as something imbued deeply into the human condition.
Regardless, when speaking of this collection, all my changes were there and I am simply helpless to the charms and beauty of this body of work.
Other endorsements:
After finishing the first section of poems (Intellectual Things, 1930), I knew that this was a collection that would be important to me until I return the dust I borrowed to exist in this world--to mangle one of S.K.'s phrases. As a result, I ordered The Collected Poems so that I would have it ASAP and thereafter. It has arrived and would be placed on my special black shelf that holds my essentials and favorites, but it is currently residing by my bed so I may read a poem or two before drifting off.
This collection has instantly moved to my "essential shelf" and will be read throughout my life.
I have always referred to only one person as S.K in the past. He being the Great Dane (no, not Scooby Doo), Soren Kierkegaard. Stanley Kunitz and the great sensei Steve Kendall are my two newest and highest ranking S.K.s.
I don't know that any of Mr. Kunitz's poems will resonate with anyone as much as they have with me. One of the mysteries and joys of why we read is to uncover gems that shine for us and to breathe new air that revives our souls. He speaks to me. More than that I cannot say.
From: Intellectual Things (1930)--
Transformation
All night he ran, his body was air,
But that was in another year.
Lately the answered shape of his laughter,
The shape of his smallest word, is fire.
He who is a fierce young crier
Of poems will be tranquil as water,
Keeping, in sunset glow, the pure
Image of limitless desire;
Then enter earth and come to be,
Inch by inch, geography.
--------
So Intricately Is This World Resolved
So intricately is this world resolved
Of substance arched on thrust of cicumstance,
The earth's organic meaning so involved
That none may break the pattern of his dance;
Lest, deviating, he confound the line
Of reason with the destiny of race,
And, altering the perilous design,
Bring ruin like a rain on time and space.
Lover, it is good to lie in the sweet grass
With a dove-soft nimble girl. But O lover,
Lift no destroying hand; let fortune pass
Unchallenged, beauty sleep; dare not to cover
Her mouth with kisses by the garden wall,
Lest, cracking in bright air, a planet fall.
--------
The Words of the Preacher
Taking infection from the vulgar air
And sick with the extravagant disease
Of life, my soul rejected the sweet snare
Of happiness; declined
That democratic bait, set in the world
By fortune's old and mediocre mind.
To love a changing shape with perfect faith
Is a waste of faith; to follow dying things
With deathless hope is vain; to go from breath
To breath, so to be fed
And put to sleep, is cheat and shame--because
By piecemeal living a man in doomed, I said.
For time with clever fingers ties the knot
Of life that is extended like a rope,
And bundling up the spinning of our though
(The ribbons and the lace
That might have made a garment for the wind),
Constricts our substance to a cipher's space.
Into the middle of my thought I crept
And on the bosom of the angel lay,
Lived all my life at once; and oh I wept
At what I could foresee;
Upon his death-soft burning plumage wept
To vie with God for His eternity.
-----
The Change
Dissolving in the chemic vat
Of time, man (gristle and fat),
Corrupting on a rock in space
That crumbles, lifts his impermanent face
To watch the stars, his brain locked tight
Against the tall revolving night.
Yet is he neither here nor there
Because tomorrow comes again
Foreshadowed, and the ragged wing
Of yesterday's remembering
Cuts sharply the immediate moon;
Nor is he always; late and soon
Becoming, never being, till
Becoming is a being still.
Here, Now, and Always, man would be
Inviolate eternally:
This is his spirit's trinity.
------
From: Passport to War (1944)--
(After the bombing of Pearl Harbor)
The Last Picnic
The guests in their summer colors have fled
Through field and hedgerow. Come, let’s pick
The bones and feathers of our fun
And kill the fire with a savage stick.
The figures of our country play,
The mocking dancers, in a swirl
Of laughter waved from the evening’s edge,
Wrote finis to a pastoral.
Now the tongue of the military man,
Summoning the violent,
Calls the wild dogs out of their holes
And the deep Indian from his tent,
Not to be tamed, not to be stamped
Under. Earth-faced, behind this grove,
Our failures creep with soldier hearts,
Pointing their guns at what we love.
When they shall paint our sockets gray
And light us like a stinking fuse,
Remember that we once could say,
Yesterday we had a world to lose.
--------------
From: Garland, Danger
End of Summer
An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.
I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones,
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.
Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part of my life was over.
Already the iron door of the north
Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their populations forth,
And a cruel wind blows.
---
From: Passing Through-The Later Poems:
Excerpt from Proteus:
From Proteus:
He was the world's supreme illusionist
taught by necessity how to melt his cage,
slipping at will through his adversaries' grasp
by self-denial, displaying one by one
his famous repertoire of shifting forms,
from lion and serpent to fire and waterfall.
But now he was heavy in his heart and languid,
sensing the time had come to leave his flock.
Must he prepare himself once more for the test?
He could not recollect the secret codes
that gave him access to his other lives.
-------
more here:
http://stanleykunitzpoetry.blogspot.com/
About SK:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/s...
August 22, 2007
My God, no man I have ever met has had so much relaxed wisdom and acceptance for the way things are, including each and everyone's impending death. I don't know if I'll ever love a poet more than Kunitz. I wish I could better explain this.
August 29, 2020
The book includes selected poems from Intellectual Things (1930), Passport to War (1944), This Garland, Danger in Selected Poems (1928-1958), The Testing-Tree (1971), The Layers in The Poems of Stanley Kunitz (1928-1978), Next-to-Last-Things (1985), Passing Through (1995)
I have been trying to read past post laureates, and as a two-time laureate, I had high expectations for Kunitz. So many readers love his work! This collection was the only book my library has, so I borrowed it and dove in. I found myself confused and disappointed, especially with the earlier poems. These poems do not speak to me. So many reviewers praise Kunitz for being a straightforward writer, but I don’t see it. I was so confused by most of his poems. Many seem so tied up in rhyming and meter that they lose sight of what they are trying to say.
In the 70s (the era of The Testing Tree, his poems did become more accessible for me. Maybe I should've just skipped the first half of this book (but how could I have known, if I hadn't read them?). It looks like Kunitz made the selections for this volume, and I wish he had selected just a few early poems, and leaned heavily on the more recent poems. The very last poem of the book, Touch Me, is incredibly powerful and moving. Would they were all like that. (I won't include it here, this review is long enough, and it's easily found online.)
I enjoyed almost all of the translations, but it was confusing to have translations scattered among Kunitz's own work, I didn't realize at first that they were translated from other poets (I thought "from Anna Akhmatova" - for example - just meant he'd been inspired by one of the other poems and wrote this one in reply). It would have made more sense to collect all of the translations into their own section; their original publication dates could be preserved in the Notes.
Most of the time, especially with the older poems, I have no idea what Kunitz is saying. I think maybe you need a degree in Literature to understand these poems. I’m not a stupid person, and I’ve read quite a bit, but I am not very good at parsing out that this symbolizes that because it’s an allusion to some other classic work I haven’t read and it means this other thing, and I suspect that’s what’s going on in these poems. I'm used to the more personal, confessional style, in which the poem is actually saying something about the poet's life. These poems seem to often just be inspired by things (such as a poem inspired by watching a show on UFO abductions). I would never know about that connection if the information was not included in the Notes, the poem does not stand on its own.
For example, The Man Upstairs seems to be telling the reader something, but I don’t know what he’s saying.
Something seems to be happening in The Way Down, but I don’t know what.
My best guess: this is using the image of elk or deer hunting to represent doubting God as you age? I could be completely wrong though. What is going on here? What’s going down? Where is down?
Every poem is like this, clearly saying something, but hiding behind metaphors and allusions. I found it very frustrating to never understand what was being said.
I thought I understood this poem, but then I didn't:
So, okay, I can see some meaning in the first two stanzas, his mother peeks on his sleeping, his sister is spending all her free time with her soldier-boyfriend, but ... why does he see his father flying? why is the wind walking on his neck???
What does it mean? who is the inlander? why salt hay? what is there a leaf IN his head?
I know this review is getting really long, but I want to include one more poem, which was originally published in his 1985 collection. This is a perfect example of how strong his later poems were. This poem really charmed me, and it doesn't seem to be online anywhere. (CW for death of a dog.)
I was doubly surprised that I didn’t enjoy these poems, because the prologue is spectacular. It’s so spectacular that I feel the need to reproduce a big chunk of it here:
If only his poems had been that straightforward and beautiful.
I have been trying to read past post laureates, and as a two-time laureate, I had high expectations for Kunitz. So many readers love his work! This collection was the only book my library has, so I borrowed it and dove in. I found myself confused and disappointed, especially with the earlier poems. These poems do not speak to me. So many reviewers praise Kunitz for being a straightforward writer, but I don’t see it. I was so confused by most of his poems. Many seem so tied up in rhyming and meter that they lose sight of what they are trying to say.
In the 70s (the era of The Testing Tree, his poems did become more accessible for me. Maybe I should've just skipped the first half of this book (but how could I have known, if I hadn't read them?). It looks like Kunitz made the selections for this volume, and I wish he had selected just a few early poems, and leaned heavily on the more recent poems. The very last poem of the book, Touch Me, is incredibly powerful and moving. Would they were all like that. (I won't include it here, this review is long enough, and it's easily found online.)
I enjoyed almost all of the translations, but it was confusing to have translations scattered among Kunitz's own work, I didn't realize at first that they were translated from other poets (I thought "from Anna Akhmatova" - for example - just meant he'd been inspired by one of the other poems and wrote this one in reply). It would have made more sense to collect all of the translations into their own section; their original publication dates could be preserved in the Notes.
Most of the time, especially with the older poems, I have no idea what Kunitz is saying. I think maybe you need a degree in Literature to understand these poems. I’m not a stupid person, and I’ve read quite a bit, but I am not very good at parsing out that this symbolizes that because it’s an allusion to some other classic work I haven’t read and it means this other thing, and I suspect that’s what’s going on in these poems. I'm used to the more personal, confessional style, in which the poem is actually saying something about the poet's life. These poems seem to often just be inspired by things (such as a poem inspired by watching a show on UFO abductions). I would never know about that connection if the information was not included in the Notes, the poem does not stand on its own.
For example, The Man Upstairs seems to be telling the reader something, but I don’t know what he’s saying.
The Man Upstairs
The old man sick with boyhood fears,
Whose thin shanks ride the naked blast,
Intones; the gray somnambulist
Creaks down interminable stairs,
Dreaming my future as his past.
A flower withers in its vase,
A print detaches from the wall,
Beyond the last electric bill
Slow days are crumbling into days
Without the unction of farewell.
Tonight there suffers in my street
The passion of the silent clerk
Whose drowned face cries the windows dark
Where once the bone of mercy beat.
I turn; I perish into work.
O Magus with the leathern hand,
The wasted heart, the trailing star,
Time is your madness, which I share,
Blowing next winter into mind .. .
And love herself not there, not there.
Something seems to be happening in The Way Down, but I don’t know what.
The Way Down
1
Time swings her burning hands
I saw him going down
Into those mythic lands
Bearing his selfhood's gold,
A last heroic speck
Of matter in his mind
That ecstasy could not crack
Nor metaphysics grind.
I saw him going down
Veridical with bane
Where pastes of phosphor shine
To a cabin underground
Where his hermit father lives
Escaping pound by pound
From his breast-buckled gyves
In his hermit father's coat,
The coat without a seam,
That the race, in its usury, bought
For the agonist to redeem,
By dying in it, one
Degree a day till the whole
Circle's run.
2.
When the magician died, I wept,
I also died, I under leaf forgot
The stars, the distaff, and the crystal bowl.
I hugged the ignorance of stone
Under the line of cricket's thunder
Where the white chariot of the winter sun
Raced to the axle pole.
Why am I suddenly warm all over?
By the small mouths of the rain
I'm tempted. Must I learn again to breathe?
Help me, my wordlings, leave
To the hoot owl in the dismal wood
His kingdom of blight
And empty branching halls.
Air thickens to dirt.
Great hairy seeds that soar aloft
Like comers trailing tender spume
Break in the night with soft
Explosions into bloom.
Where the fleshed out root stirs,
Marvelous horned strong game,
Brine-scaled, dun-caked with mould,
Dynastic thunder-bison, Asian-crude,
Bedded in moss and slime,
Wake, and the rhythm of their blood
Shoots through the long veins of my name.
Hail, thickets! Hail, dark stream!
3.
Time swings her burning hands.
The blossom is the fruit,
And where I walk, the leaves
Lie level with the root.
My brave god went from me,
I saw him going down
Incorrigibly wild
In a cloud of golden air.
O father in the wood,
Mad father of us all,
King of our antlered walls,
Our candelabrum-pride
That the pretender kills,
Receive your stumbling child
Drunk with the morning-dew
Into your fibrous love
With which creation's strung;
Embrace him, raise him high,
Keeping the old time young,
And hold him through the night
Our best hopes share, as bright,
As peerless as a cock’s eye.
My best guess: this is using the image of elk or deer hunting to represent doubting God as you age? I could be completely wrong though. What is going on here? What’s going down? Where is down?
Every poem is like this, clearly saying something, but hiding behind metaphors and allusions. I found it very frustrating to never understand what was being said.
I thought I understood this poem, but then I didn't:
Three Floors
Mother was a crack of light
and a grey eye peeping.
I made believe by breathing hard
that I was sleeping.
Sister's doughboy on last leave
had robbed me of her hand;
downstairs at intervals she played
Warum on the baby grand.
Under the roof a wardrobe trunk
whose lock a boy could pick
contained a red masonic hat
and a walking stick.
Bolt upright in my bed that night
I saw my father flying;
the wind was walking on my neck,
the windowpanes were crying.
So, okay, I can see some meaning in the first two stanzas, his mother peeks on his sleeping, his sister is spending all her free time with her soldier-boyfriend, but ... why does he see his father flying? why is the wind walking on his neck???
The Mulch
A man with a leaf in his head
watches an indefatigable gull
dropping a piss-clam on the rocks
to break it open.
Repeat. Repeat.
He is an inlander
who loves the margins of the sea,
and everywhere he goes he carries
a bag of earth on his back.
Why is he down in the tide marsh?
Why is he gathering salt hay
in bushel baskets crammed to his chin?
“It is a blue and northern air,”
he says, as if the shiftings of the sky
had taught him husbandry.
Birthdays for him are when he wakes
and falls into the news of weather.
“Try! Try!” clicks the beetle in his wrist,
his heart is an educated swamp,
and he is mindful of his garden,
which prepares to die.
What does it mean? who is the inlander? why salt hay? what is there a leaf IN his head?
I know this review is getting really long, but I want to include one more poem, which was originally published in his 1985 collection. This is a perfect example of how strong his later poems were. This poem really charmed me, and it doesn't seem to be online anywhere. (CW for death of a dog.)
Raccoon Journal
July 14
rac-coon’, n. from the American Indian (Algonquian) arahkunem,“he scratches with the hands.”
— New World Dictionary
July 17
They live promiscuously in the woods
above the marsh, snuggling in hollow trees
or rock-piled hillside dens,
from which they swagger in dead of night,
nosy, precocious, bushy-tailed,
to inspect their properties in town.
At every house they drop a calling card,
doorstep deposits of soft reddish scats
and heavy sprays of territorial scent
that on damp mornings mixes with the dew.
August 21-26
I’ve seen them, under the streetlight,
paddling up the lane,
five pelts in single file,
halting in unison to topple
a garbage can and gorge
on lobster shells and fish heads
or scattered parts of chicken.
Last year my neighbor’s dog,
a full-grown Labrador retriever,
chased a grizzly old codger
into the tidal basin,
where shaggy arms reached up
from the ooze to embrace him,
dragging his muzzle under
until at length he drowned.
There’s nobody left this side
of Gull Hill to tangle
with them, certainly not
my superannuated cat,
domesticated out of nature,
who stretches by the stove
and puts on a show of bristling.
She does that even when mice
go racing round the kitchen.
We seem to be two of a kind,
though that’s not to say I’m happy
paying my vegetable tithe
over and over
out of ripe summer’s bounty
to feed omnivorous appetites,
or listening to the scratch of prowlers
from the fragrant terraces, as they
dig-dig-dig, because they’re mad
for bonemeal, uprooting plants and bulbs,
whole clumps, squirming and dank,
wherever they catch a whiff
of buried angel dust.
October 31
To be like Orpheus, who could talk
with animals in their own language –
in sleep I had that art, but now
I’ve walked into the separate
wilderness of age,
where the old, libidinous beasts
assume familiar shapes,
pretending to be tamed.
Raccoons! I can hear them
confabulating on the porch,
half churring, half growling,
bubbling to a manic hoot
that curdles the night air.
Something out there appalls.
On the back-door screen
a heavy piece of fur hangs,
spread-eagled, breathing hard,
hooked by prehensile fingers,
with its pointed snout pressing in,
and the dark agates of its bandit eyes
furiously blazing. Behind,
where shadows deepen, burly forms
lumber from side to side
like diminished bears
on a flat-footed shuffle.
They watch me, unafraid.
I know they’ll never leave;
they’ve come to take possession.
— Provincetown, 1984
I was doubly surprised that I didn’t enjoy these poems, because the prologue is spectacular. It’s so spectacular that I feel the need to reproduce a big chunk of it here:
Years ago I came to the realization that the most poignant of all lyric tensions stems from the awareness that we are living and dying at once. To embrace such knowledge and yet remain compassionate and whole – that is the consummation of the endeavor of art.
At the core of one's existence is a pool of energy that has nothing to do with personal identity, but that falls away from self, blends into the natural universe. Man has only a bit part to play in the whole marvelous show of creation.
Poems would be easy if our heads weren't so full of the day's clatter. The task is to get through to the other side,
where we can hear the deep rhythmns that connect us with the stars and the tides.
I keep trying to improve my controls over the language, so that i won’t have to tell lies. And I keep reading the masters, because they infect me with human possibility.
Our poems can never satisfy us, since they are at best a diminished echo of a song that maybe one or twice in a lifetime we've heard and keep trying to recall.
I like to think it is the poet’s love of particulars, the things of this world, that leads him to universals.
A badly made thing falls apart. It takes only a few years for most of the energy to leak out of a defective work of art. To put it simply, conservation of energy is the function of form.
We have all been expelled from the Garden, but the ones who suffer most in exile are those who are still permitted to dream of perfection.
... At my age, after you're done - or ruefully think you're done - with the nagging anxietiesand complications of your youth, what is there left for you to confront but the great
simplicities? I never tire of birdsong and sky and weather. I want to write poems that are
natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through
and see the world.
If only his poems had been that straightforward and beautiful.
December 30, 2012
Kunitz is my favorite poet. It's hard for me to find the words to give his work justice. He obviously never had a problem with words. The way his words of nature flow into my heart... I feel, I hear, I smell, I taste, I know. I wish it was mine. I wish all of his thoughts were my own, not so that I could write poetry like him, but so that I could embrace the beauty while I breathe. I...need to read this book again.
November 8, 2021
4.7 stars
Read
January 8, 2024Consolidating Gains (December 2005)
Jahan Ramazani, in Poetry of Mourning, argues that we have great need of elegies. “[We] need them because people die around us every day,” and we are powerless to do anything about this as “neither science nor technology can fix death, reverse loss, or cure bereavement” (ix). However, Ramazani may underestimate what we are capable of doing with technology, for we make use a certain kind of technology—our narratives—to make us feel less susceptible to death. Indeed, we may ask even more of them—and for an opposite purpose. Particularly in his mother-son poems, Stanley Kunitz for instance uses poetry to consolidate himself to his life’s gains, making it for him foremost an instrument of acquisition, and perhaps never truly of defense or repair. Even true for his many elegies, that is, his poems are much more about the better claiming of still-available riches than they are about recovering from what’s been lost to him.
Especially when he was young, Kunitz feared his hold on life was not secure. In an interview with Leslie Kelen in American Poetry Review, Kunitz says that as a young man he hoped to find a “language that saves,” which would help him from feeling vulnerable to “[t]he destruction of the self, the loss of identity, becoming nameless” (52). He feared losing his own autonomous identity, which had been hard-won, for life had shown him that it is very difficult to move beyond one’s roots. He refers to the terminating poem of Intellectual Things—a book he originally planned to title, Against Destruction (52)—and, after quoting select parts of it, says, “The young man whose voice I hear in that poem is telling me of his discontent and his determination to change his circumstances and himself. He knows that he must test his resolve in the crucible of experience. At the same time he realizes that he cannot escape from his sources: in his end is his beginning” (52). The beginning from which Kunitz emerged was a household ruled by an especially “dominant” (51), dominating mother—someone who had “lost [the] [. . .] capacity [to demonstrate affection] [. . .] through all the tragiccircumstances of her life” (54). And if we attend both to what object-relations theory has to say about the lifelong effects of having had parents who were denied affection, and to his poems (note, not just to his “mother-son” poems), we have basis for concluding that many of them restage early experiences where attempts to detach himself from his mother lead to his becoming familiar with, and being strongly cowed by, the threat of annihilation.
Unlike conventional Freudian psychoanalysis, which holds that the boy fears his father will castrate him unless he desists in his claim upon the mother, its branch, object-relations, understands children as first coming to know the threat of bodily mutilation, of parental sadism, through experiences with their mothers, the primary object one relates with that. And unlike Freudian theory, where growth, emergence from the maternal fold, is something the child, though he does not desire it, finds easy to manage, as it is a path the father encourages for it being a detour away from his own claims, object-relations theory is more likely to posit that growth, separation from the mother, is often very difficult for the child to achieve. For as Lloyd DeMause explains,
[I]mmature mothers and fathers [,that is, mothers and fathers who themselves were not reacted to warmly, affectionately by their own parents] expect their child to give them the love they missed when they were children, and therefore experience the child’s independence as rejection. Mothers in particular have had extremely traumaticdevelopmental histories throughout history; one cannot severely neglect and abuse little girls and expect them to magically turn into good mothers when they grow up. [. . .] The moment the infant needs something or turns away from her to explore the world, it triggers her own memories of maternal rejection. When the infant cries, the immature mother hears her mother, her father, her siblings, and her spouse screaming at her. She then “accuses the infant of being unaffectionate, unrewarding and selfish . . . as not interested in me” [Brazelton and Cramer 11]. All growth and individuation by the child is therefore experienced as rejection. “When the mother cannot tolerate the child’s being a separate person with her own personality and needs, and demands instead that the child mirror her, separation becomes heavily tinged with basicterror for the child” [255]. (151)
Kunitz rarely overtly wrote about his relationship with his mother until later on in life (his early family poems were father-son poems), until after she died. It would seem appropriate to consider them elegies, then, but the difficulty in doing so is that it is difficult to understand them as registering any mourning. Nor should they have, for Kunitz says that the death of his mother and sisters was empowering: “The disappearance of my family liberated me. It gave me a sense that I was the only survivor and if the experiences of my life [. . .] were to be told, it was within my power to do so” (qtd. in Keillor). And many of his mother-son poems portray their relationship so that her disappearance would be cause for jubilation, for they consistently show her as someone whose own tragiclife experiences made her incapable of tolerating his own desire for independence and attendance.
Peter Sacks suggests that many elegies, through the “sacrifice or mimed death of the personification of nature,” function to “reverse [man’s] [. . .] passive relation to the mother or matrix” (21). “My Mother’s Pears,” if it is an elegy to his mother, would have to be considered an unorthodox one then, for it is one in which the Mother and her matrix exert their dominance over Kunitz. It is one of many of Kunitz’ mother-son poems which begin with him enjoying some object, some activity, outside his mother’s influence. This poem begins with a gift being presented to him by “strangers” (The Collected Poems 13). And what a gift! He writes that a “nest” (7) of “[p]lump, green-gold Worcester’s pride” (1) pears were “deposit[ed] at my [i.e., his] door” (6; emphasis added). He prefers to believe the gifts were for him, that he was the intended recipient, not just of their pears but of the warm intent, the “kindness” (14), that moved the strangers to give them to him, but his mother intrudes to correct him in this.
Kunitz introduces her so that she seems either a natural complement to or a rival of the strangers. The tercet—“Those stranger are my friends / whose kindness blesses the house / my mother built at the edge of town” (13-15)—in effect has the house (and Kunitz, since the blessings occurred at “my [i.e., his] door”) sandwiched between the two influences. They “bless,” the mother “builds”: these influences could work in tandem, except the poem makes the comparison simply to show how different they are from one another. “Build” is singular, no nonsense. It might suggest pride, but not play. The blessing strangers built an abode too—they put together the “crinkled nest” of pears—but the work involved seems pleasant. The pears were “hand-picked and polished and packed” (5). We sense craftsmanship and communal effort; and with the alliteration, with similar but pleasantly variant (“tic, tac, toe”) words, we sense play. Even “transport[ing]” them might have been pleasant, for they were “transported through autumn skies” (2), at “harvest time” (12). Moreover, since the work was pleasant, and since, though “[a] smaller than usual crop / [,] [they] [. . .] still had enough to share with [him]” (11-12)—that is, since they didn’t deprive themselves in order to provision Kunitz, their gifts do not invite guilt or obligation. How different from his mother’s gifts, then, for they lead to household disrepair and personal destitution. We are told that she “marr[ied] again” (19), “for her children’s sake” (18), and that this would lead to a home where “windows would grow dark / and the velvet drapes [would] come down” (20-21). Since the poem has already associated the essence of an object with the state of mind involved in crafting and delivering it—proud pears are provided kindly—the foreclosed house is a metaphor for her own withdrawnness. The mother, then, is quickly established, not just as someone who would oppose their influence, but as the one clearly in need of their benefaction. Her “dark” home should have welcomed in the gift of “polished” “pears,” with their “bright lea[ves]” (9). The “velvet drapes [which] [came] [. . .] down” require the same sort of attendance as the pears received, which were carefully “picked and polished and packed.” And yet there was her son, pretending they were his rightful property—that they had come to “[his] door.”
He is made to seem an interloper. His interception is made to seem a transgression worthy of punishment, and one is handed out. He is set to work— hard work. He finds himself “knee-deep in dirt / with a shovel in his hand” (24-25). The gift-giving strangers have been banished from the poem. Further punishment?—quite possibly. For in the following tercet—and as if he is not now to be receiving visitors—the mother is overtly shown sending away those who “appear on the scene” (28) without their being there at her bequest. Of course, the “visitors are his “sisters” (28), not “strangers,” but the alliterative resemblance between the two sorts of visitors is marked, and so too the poem’s portrayal of them—especially in comparison to how the poem portrays the mother. The strangers were kind, the sisters, fun: “they skip out of our sight / in their matching middy blouses” (32-33). We note the alliterative play here too, and it reminds us of how the pears were prepared. The mother, however, is a no-nonsense commander: though her “glasses [may] glint” (24), there is no play in the manner in which she is described. “Mother has wrapped a kerchief round her head” (26), and this commander “waves them [i.e., his sisters] back into the house” (30). She waves them away so that they can “fetch [. . .] pails of water” (31); but since we learn of the real cause for their dismissal only at the beginning of the next verse unit, the poem’s eleventh tercet—that is, given the severe indentation of each of this poem’s tercet’s terminating lines, a ways off—we are left to conclude that their unexpected entrance amounted to a considerable offense.
The poem ends with alliteration, but not with alliterative play. There is nothing fun about the lines, “‘Make room / for the roots!’ my mother cries, / ‘Dig the hole deeper’” (37-39), when we know Kunitz is already “knee-deep in dirt.” She is directing him to plant a tree on her property—a pear tree. No further need for strangers’ pears: henceforth he will be eating his mother’s pears. He is participating in his being further constrained within the “orbit created by his mother’s gravitational power” (Orr 9): he is here, digging his own grave. And it is significant that the poem terminates with him associated more with roots than with pears—pears, after all, are expected to fall from pear trees—for since this tree is associated with the mother, the poem ends with him being linked to the tree’s sustenance, not its extensions. The poem finishes with him being likened to her, with him mirroring her. The terminating tercet, which begins with “It is taller than I” (37), is followed by these two commands of his mother’s, where as well the same consonants are used to begin and end each of them.
Kunitz finds himself rooted in the earth at the end of “My Mother’s Pears,” and his freedom to move as he pleases is also lost to him by the end of another mother- son poem, “The Testing Tree.” In this poem he is actually shown enjoying two things in particular—his mobility (freedom) and his precious “perfect stones” (7). His enjoyment of the former is the subject of the poem’s first section. As in “My Mother’s Pears,” alliteration is used to convey the pleasure and play of action:
then sprinted lickety- split on my magicKeds from a crouching start,
scarcely touching the ground with my flying skin
as I poured it on (10-15)
The capital “k” “Keds” stand out in these lines—an object enables, helps generate his speedy flight. He slows to a “walk” (55), but not owing to the difficulties a different object—a “bend,” which would end his fun by “loop[ing] [him] [. . .] home” (25)—presents him with, but because he is preparing to participate in a great game which requires he stay calm and in control. So he “walked, deliberate / on to the clearing / with the stones in [his] [. . .] pocket” (55-57). And there we are told:
In the haze of afternoon,
While the air flowed saffron,
I played me game for keeps—
for love, for poetry,
and for eternal life—
after the trials of summer. (73-78)
Pairs pale in comparison; it is indeed difficult to imagine a greater bounty. And so it is no surprise that to assist him in winning it, he asks for help—that he asks his father to “bless [his] [. . .] good right arm” (72). We don’t know if his father obliged, but we do know that, just like after he received kindness from strangers in “My Mother’s Pears,” once again his mother intrudes.
He has been avoiding home. He has sought out and found environments where there was “no one no where to deny” his play (19-20). And so, in apparent response, his mother, his “home,” come to him—and do far worse than just tame him. The previous three sections attended to his will and prowess, the fourth attends to and features his mother’s:
In my recurring dream
my mother stands
in her bridal gown
under the burning lilac
with Bernard Shaw and Bertie
Russell kissing her hands (79-84)
This sentence is made to seem a response to the one which terminated the third section, which also began with “In my.” The details in these two particular tercets respond to the details in the previous section—his mother’s will loops back around his own: she checks, opposes her son. While he “stood in the shadow” (61) [. . .] “of the inexhaustible oak” (63), she “stands” “under the burning lilac.” He desires love, poetry, and eternal life, and she makes claim to all three. He desires poetry; she is associated with the burning lilac—fiery desire and flowered poesy are hers already. He seeks eternal life; she, with her “owl’s face” (86), who “makes barking noises” (87), already seems a grotesque of ancient myth and Jung. He wanted love; she has Shaw and Russell kissing her hands, kissing from out of her hands. That is, though she stands in her “bridal gown,” two men other than her husband attend to her. And owing to her son already having claim her husband’s attention, we are left to wonder if his [Kunitz’] action is responsible for her being attended to by these wrong men.
That is, in this mother-son poem as well, we are lead to associate the narrative turn of what had hitherto been a poem about play and enjoyment, not just with his mother’s appearance, but with his own ostensibly blameworthy behavior: there may be reason for guilt, reason for him to sabotage his errant run. We note that we are no longer drawn to attend to legs—the action has moved on to arms and hands. “Good right arm” becomes “kissing her hands” becomes “[h]her minatory finger points” (88). While the shift from walking to running conveyed his increasing vitality, appropriately, the microscoping arm images foretell its constriction. Her command may well have tamed Shaw and Russell into making a supplicant’s gesture; and faced with the power implicit in this threatening gesture, he no longer wills his way through the landscape but rather at her bequest. He passes under a “cardboard doorway” (89): the great oak, we note, is replaced by what has been built from the wreckage of trees. He is directed to a well, to a hole—a hole, which, as it is filling up with dirt, seems grave-like. He obliges his sudden feeling that it is “necessary to go / through dark and deeper dark” (166-67), but unlike before when he had “kept his appointment” (60), he is not now rewarded for doing so. Instead, he finds himself far away from his testing-tree, and without his stones. He hasn’t lost them; they were taken away—or at least that is what his cry, “Give me back my stones!” (111), suggests is what he thinks occurred. There is protest in this line, and, according to Sacks, one of the elegy’s traditional conventions is to voice protest (though usually through “the form of a question” [22]) as it helps the mourner transform “grief” and/or “rage” into something purposeful. But according to Sacks the protest normally arises from having lost one’s first and primary object of desire—one’s close association with one’s mother—not from just having lost the consolation prize, the object we were to transfer our love to and were supposed to get to keep. Conventional elegies, that is, are supposed to be “places” which enable a “substitutive turn” (5) away from the mother.
Jahan Ramazani, in Poetry of Mourning, argues that we have great need of elegies. “[We] need them because people die around us every day,” and we are powerless to do anything about this as “neither science nor technology can fix death, reverse loss, or cure bereavement” (ix). However, Ramazani may underestimate what we are capable of doing with technology, for we make use a certain kind of technology—our narratives—to make us feel less susceptible to death. Indeed, we may ask even more of them—and for an opposite purpose. Particularly in his mother-son poems, Stanley Kunitz for instance uses poetry to consolidate himself to his life’s gains, making it for him foremost an instrument of acquisition, and perhaps never truly of defense or repair. Even true for his many elegies, that is, his poems are much more about the better claiming of still-available riches than they are about recovering from what’s been lost to him.
Especially when he was young, Kunitz feared his hold on life was not secure. In an interview with Leslie Kelen in American Poetry Review, Kunitz says that as a young man he hoped to find a “language that saves,” which would help him from feeling vulnerable to “[t]he destruction of the self, the loss of identity, becoming nameless” (52). He feared losing his own autonomous identity, which had been hard-won, for life had shown him that it is very difficult to move beyond one’s roots. He refers to the terminating poem of Intellectual Things—a book he originally planned to title, Against Destruction (52)—and, after quoting select parts of it, says, “The young man whose voice I hear in that poem is telling me of his discontent and his determination to change his circumstances and himself. He knows that he must test his resolve in the crucible of experience. At the same time he realizes that he cannot escape from his sources: in his end is his beginning” (52). The beginning from which Kunitz emerged was a household ruled by an especially “dominant” (51), dominating mother—someone who had “lost [the] [. . .] capacity [to demonstrate affection] [. . .] through all the tragiccircumstances of her life” (54). And if we attend both to what object-relations theory has to say about the lifelong effects of having had parents who were denied affection, and to his poems (note, not just to his “mother-son” poems), we have basis for concluding that many of them restage early experiences where attempts to detach himself from his mother lead to his becoming familiar with, and being strongly cowed by, the threat of annihilation.
Unlike conventional Freudian psychoanalysis, which holds that the boy fears his father will castrate him unless he desists in his claim upon the mother, its branch, object-relations, understands children as first coming to know the threat of bodily mutilation, of parental sadism, through experiences with their mothers, the primary object one relates with that. And unlike Freudian theory, where growth, emergence from the maternal fold, is something the child, though he does not desire it, finds easy to manage, as it is a path the father encourages for it being a detour away from his own claims, object-relations theory is more likely to posit that growth, separation from the mother, is often very difficult for the child to achieve. For as Lloyd DeMause explains,
[I]mmature mothers and fathers [,that is, mothers and fathers who themselves were not reacted to warmly, affectionately by their own parents] expect their child to give them the love they missed when they were children, and therefore experience the child’s independence as rejection. Mothers in particular have had extremely traumaticdevelopmental histories throughout history; one cannot severely neglect and abuse little girls and expect them to magically turn into good mothers when they grow up. [. . .] The moment the infant needs something or turns away from her to explore the world, it triggers her own memories of maternal rejection. When the infant cries, the immature mother hears her mother, her father, her siblings, and her spouse screaming at her. She then “accuses the infant of being unaffectionate, unrewarding and selfish . . . as not interested in me” [Brazelton and Cramer 11]. All growth and individuation by the child is therefore experienced as rejection. “When the mother cannot tolerate the child’s being a separate person with her own personality and needs, and demands instead that the child mirror her, separation becomes heavily tinged with basicterror for the child” [255]. (151)
Kunitz rarely overtly wrote about his relationship with his mother until later on in life (his early family poems were father-son poems), until after she died. It would seem appropriate to consider them elegies, then, but the difficulty in doing so is that it is difficult to understand them as registering any mourning. Nor should they have, for Kunitz says that the death of his mother and sisters was empowering: “The disappearance of my family liberated me. It gave me a sense that I was the only survivor and if the experiences of my life [. . .] were to be told, it was within my power to do so” (qtd. in Keillor). And many of his mother-son poems portray their relationship so that her disappearance would be cause for jubilation, for they consistently show her as someone whose own tragiclife experiences made her incapable of tolerating his own desire for independence and attendance.
Peter Sacks suggests that many elegies, through the “sacrifice or mimed death of the personification of nature,” function to “reverse [man’s] [. . .] passive relation to the mother or matrix” (21). “My Mother’s Pears,” if it is an elegy to his mother, would have to be considered an unorthodox one then, for it is one in which the Mother and her matrix exert their dominance over Kunitz. It is one of many of Kunitz’ mother-son poems which begin with him enjoying some object, some activity, outside his mother’s influence. This poem begins with a gift being presented to him by “strangers” (The Collected Poems 13). And what a gift! He writes that a “nest” (7) of “[p]lump, green-gold Worcester’s pride” (1) pears were “deposit[ed] at my [i.e., his] door” (6; emphasis added). He prefers to believe the gifts were for him, that he was the intended recipient, not just of their pears but of the warm intent, the “kindness” (14), that moved the strangers to give them to him, but his mother intrudes to correct him in this.
Kunitz introduces her so that she seems either a natural complement to or a rival of the strangers. The tercet—“Those stranger are my friends / whose kindness blesses the house / my mother built at the edge of town” (13-15)—in effect has the house (and Kunitz, since the blessings occurred at “my [i.e., his] door”) sandwiched between the two influences. They “bless,” the mother “builds”: these influences could work in tandem, except the poem makes the comparison simply to show how different they are from one another. “Build” is singular, no nonsense. It might suggest pride, but not play. The blessing strangers built an abode too—they put together the “crinkled nest” of pears—but the work involved seems pleasant. The pears were “hand-picked and polished and packed” (5). We sense craftsmanship and communal effort; and with the alliteration, with similar but pleasantly variant (“tic, tac, toe”) words, we sense play. Even “transport[ing]” them might have been pleasant, for they were “transported through autumn skies” (2), at “harvest time” (12). Moreover, since the work was pleasant, and since, though “[a] smaller than usual crop / [,] [they] [. . .] still had enough to share with [him]” (11-12)—that is, since they didn’t deprive themselves in order to provision Kunitz, their gifts do not invite guilt or obligation. How different from his mother’s gifts, then, for they lead to household disrepair and personal destitution. We are told that she “marr[ied] again” (19), “for her children’s sake” (18), and that this would lead to a home where “windows would grow dark / and the velvet drapes [would] come down” (20-21). Since the poem has already associated the essence of an object with the state of mind involved in crafting and delivering it—proud pears are provided kindly—the foreclosed house is a metaphor for her own withdrawnness. The mother, then, is quickly established, not just as someone who would oppose their influence, but as the one clearly in need of their benefaction. Her “dark” home should have welcomed in the gift of “polished” “pears,” with their “bright lea[ves]” (9). The “velvet drapes [which] [came] [. . .] down” require the same sort of attendance as the pears received, which were carefully “picked and polished and packed.” And yet there was her son, pretending they were his rightful property—that they had come to “[his] door.”
He is made to seem an interloper. His interception is made to seem a transgression worthy of punishment, and one is handed out. He is set to work— hard work. He finds himself “knee-deep in dirt / with a shovel in his hand” (24-25). The gift-giving strangers have been banished from the poem. Further punishment?—quite possibly. For in the following tercet—and as if he is not now to be receiving visitors—the mother is overtly shown sending away those who “appear on the scene” (28) without their being there at her bequest. Of course, the “visitors are his “sisters” (28), not “strangers,” but the alliterative resemblance between the two sorts of visitors is marked, and so too the poem’s portrayal of them—especially in comparison to how the poem portrays the mother. The strangers were kind, the sisters, fun: “they skip out of our sight / in their matching middy blouses” (32-33). We note the alliterative play here too, and it reminds us of how the pears were prepared. The mother, however, is a no-nonsense commander: though her “glasses [may] glint” (24), there is no play in the manner in which she is described. “Mother has wrapped a kerchief round her head” (26), and this commander “waves them [i.e., his sisters] back into the house” (30). She waves them away so that they can “fetch [. . .] pails of water” (31); but since we learn of the real cause for their dismissal only at the beginning of the next verse unit, the poem’s eleventh tercet—that is, given the severe indentation of each of this poem’s tercet’s terminating lines, a ways off—we are left to conclude that their unexpected entrance amounted to a considerable offense.
The poem ends with alliteration, but not with alliterative play. There is nothing fun about the lines, “‘Make room / for the roots!’ my mother cries, / ‘Dig the hole deeper’” (37-39), when we know Kunitz is already “knee-deep in dirt.” She is directing him to plant a tree on her property—a pear tree. No further need for strangers’ pears: henceforth he will be eating his mother’s pears. He is participating in his being further constrained within the “orbit created by his mother’s gravitational power” (Orr 9): he is here, digging his own grave. And it is significant that the poem terminates with him associated more with roots than with pears—pears, after all, are expected to fall from pear trees—for since this tree is associated with the mother, the poem ends with him being linked to the tree’s sustenance, not its extensions. The poem finishes with him being likened to her, with him mirroring her. The terminating tercet, which begins with “It is taller than I” (37), is followed by these two commands of his mother’s, where as well the same consonants are used to begin and end each of them.
Kunitz finds himself rooted in the earth at the end of “My Mother’s Pears,” and his freedom to move as he pleases is also lost to him by the end of another mother- son poem, “The Testing Tree.” In this poem he is actually shown enjoying two things in particular—his mobility (freedom) and his precious “perfect stones” (7). His enjoyment of the former is the subject of the poem’s first section. As in “My Mother’s Pears,” alliteration is used to convey the pleasure and play of action:
then sprinted lickety- split on my magicKeds from a crouching start,
scarcely touching the ground with my flying skin
as I poured it on (10-15)
The capital “k” “Keds” stand out in these lines—an object enables, helps generate his speedy flight. He slows to a “walk” (55), but not owing to the difficulties a different object—a “bend,” which would end his fun by “loop[ing] [him] [. . .] home” (25)—presents him with, but because he is preparing to participate in a great game which requires he stay calm and in control. So he “walked, deliberate / on to the clearing / with the stones in [his] [. . .] pocket” (55-57). And there we are told:
In the haze of afternoon,
While the air flowed saffron,
I played me game for keeps—
for love, for poetry,
and for eternal life—
after the trials of summer. (73-78)
Pairs pale in comparison; it is indeed difficult to imagine a greater bounty. And so it is no surprise that to assist him in winning it, he asks for help—that he asks his father to “bless [his] [. . .] good right arm” (72). We don’t know if his father obliged, but we do know that, just like after he received kindness from strangers in “My Mother’s Pears,” once again his mother intrudes.
He has been avoiding home. He has sought out and found environments where there was “no one no where to deny” his play (19-20). And so, in apparent response, his mother, his “home,” come to him—and do far worse than just tame him. The previous three sections attended to his will and prowess, the fourth attends to and features his mother’s:
In my recurring dream
my mother stands
in her bridal gown
under the burning lilac
with Bernard Shaw and Bertie
Russell kissing her hands (79-84)
This sentence is made to seem a response to the one which terminated the third section, which also began with “In my.” The details in these two particular tercets respond to the details in the previous section—his mother’s will loops back around his own: she checks, opposes her son. While he “stood in the shadow” (61) [. . .] “of the inexhaustible oak” (63), she “stands” “under the burning lilac.” He desires love, poetry, and eternal life, and she makes claim to all three. He desires poetry; she is associated with the burning lilac—fiery desire and flowered poesy are hers already. He seeks eternal life; she, with her “owl’s face” (86), who “makes barking noises” (87), already seems a grotesque of ancient myth and Jung. He wanted love; she has Shaw and Russell kissing her hands, kissing from out of her hands. That is, though she stands in her “bridal gown,” two men other than her husband attend to her. And owing to her son already having claim her husband’s attention, we are left to wonder if his [Kunitz’] action is responsible for her being attended to by these wrong men.
That is, in this mother-son poem as well, we are lead to associate the narrative turn of what had hitherto been a poem about play and enjoyment, not just with his mother’s appearance, but with his own ostensibly blameworthy behavior: there may be reason for guilt, reason for him to sabotage his errant run. We note that we are no longer drawn to attend to legs—the action has moved on to arms and hands. “Good right arm” becomes “kissing her hands” becomes “[h]her minatory finger points” (88). While the shift from walking to running conveyed his increasing vitality, appropriately, the microscoping arm images foretell its constriction. Her command may well have tamed Shaw and Russell into making a supplicant’s gesture; and faced with the power implicit in this threatening gesture, he no longer wills his way through the landscape but rather at her bequest. He passes under a “cardboard doorway” (89): the great oak, we note, is replaced by what has been built from the wreckage of trees. He is directed to a well, to a hole—a hole, which, as it is filling up with dirt, seems grave-like. He obliges his sudden feeling that it is “necessary to go / through dark and deeper dark” (166-67), but unlike before when he had “kept his appointment” (60), he is not now rewarded for doing so. Instead, he finds himself far away from his testing-tree, and without his stones. He hasn’t lost them; they were taken away—or at least that is what his cry, “Give me back my stones!” (111), suggests is what he thinks occurred. There is protest in this line, and, according to Sacks, one of the elegy’s traditional conventions is to voice protest (though usually through “the form of a question” [22]) as it helps the mourner transform “grief” and/or “rage” into something purposeful. But according to Sacks the protest normally arises from having lost one’s first and primary object of desire—one’s close association with one’s mother—not from just having lost the consolation prize, the object we were to transfer our love to and were supposed to get to keep. Conventional elegies, that is, are supposed to be “places” which enable a “substitutive turn” (5) away from the mother.
May 31, 2015
Several years ago, I read Kunitz's magnificent “King of the River”. It is a heady poem, a song and a howl of the force of life propelling salmon through the drama of birth and death. Now this collection offers the full range of Kunitz’s artistry spanning from 1930 to 1995.
Through more than half a decade, Kunitz’s poetry retains his clarity of images and ideas through a more traditional form. There is very little experiments in grammar, visual display, nor obscure words. On the readability level, he is even easier to approach than Frost and Cavafy.
The author’s vast lived experience — as well as his life of mind — gives this collection astonishing range of topics. From the minute quotidian, to the most ephemeral, Kunitz has transcended human life’s physical experience into a realm of introspection and reflection. I am not really certain that he expresses much religiousness, yet there are many poems asking the question of human life and death in that direction. For example, the moving prayer in “Benediction”
Admit no trailing wind
Into your shuttered mind
To plume the lake of sleep
With dreams. If you must weep
God give you tears, but leave
Your secrecy to grieve,
And island for your pride,
And love to nest in your side.
This collection is a chronicle of an explorer of the whole span of human life. How fortunate we are to have Kunitz to lay down all he has discovered in such crystalized (and quite accessible) verses!
Through more than half a decade, Kunitz’s poetry retains his clarity of images and ideas through a more traditional form. There is very little experiments in grammar, visual display, nor obscure words. On the readability level, he is even easier to approach than Frost and Cavafy.
The author’s vast lived experience — as well as his life of mind — gives this collection astonishing range of topics. From the minute quotidian, to the most ephemeral, Kunitz has transcended human life’s physical experience into a realm of introspection and reflection. I am not really certain that he expresses much religiousness, yet there are many poems asking the question of human life and death in that direction. For example, the moving prayer in “Benediction”
Admit no trailing wind
Into your shuttered mind
To plume the lake of sleep
With dreams. If you must weep
God give you tears, but leave
Your secrecy to grieve,
And island for your pride,
And love to nest in your side.
This collection is a chronicle of an explorer of the whole span of human life. How fortunate we are to have Kunitz to lay down all he has discovered in such crystalized (and quite accessible) verses!
January 13, 2008
Kunitz, who passed away this year at the age of 100, is one of the great American poets of the past century. This collection testifies to that fact indisputably. Published in 2000, the collection is authoritative and inviting. It left me with two urges, one to find individual collections of Kunitz’s work and the other is to eagerly look for the soon to appear Complete Poems. Traveling from a supple formalism of his early works to the later free verse eloquence, Kunitz demonstrates a relentless craftsmanship and dedication to poems of substance. So many poems jump at the reader or grab the attention in such a way that it’s hard to turn the page forward, when you want to turn back to the just finished poem’s start and read it again. “The Long Boat,” “The Testing Tree,” “Journal for My Daughter,” “Halley’s Comet,” “The Round,” “The Portrait,” and many, many more. One of my favorites of the year. It is a book that I will come back to often.
February 23, 2013
If poetry is the language of the heart, no one speaks it better than Stanley Kunitz. This remarkable man, who lived a remarkably long and full life, moves me in more ways than I can describe, without ever wallowing in the sad little emotions and sensitivities so common these days. "Touch me" may be my favorite poem of all times and heaven knows I've read and read thousands, second only to Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," a poem people talk about without bothering to revisit it, as I do, often, always finding new layers under the ones I think I know so well.
May 27, 2009
Stunning, revelatory, full of pain and beauty; decade after decade of remarkable output. Amazing to read it all in one collection, although I want to go back, over and over to reread, digest, bathe in this incredible work.
September 4, 2017
I'm not smart enough for the majority of Kunitz work, but there were at least 10 that penetrated my thick skull, and of them this was my favorite:
The Layers
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
Stanley Kunitz
The Layers
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
Stanley Kunitz
November 30, 2018
As someone who loves poetry, I did not know Stanley Kunitz until I read some quotes from him in another book I was reading. Of course, he immediately peaked my curiosity and so I set out to learn about him and read a selection of his poetry.
The Collected Poems is a great way to get a taste of Kunitz and see how his poetry evolved as his life evolved. Kunitz essentially lived through the entire century and witnessed both World Wars, the Great Depression, putting men on the moon, the rise and fall of Communism and so much of our history as a modern country. His poetry reflects it all, and it’s a unique way to view the milestones of our lives, as well as the evolution of the poet.
Highly recommend this book as a way to get to know Kunitz, and as a momentary pause to reflect on how we arrived at the 21st Century!
The Collected Poems is a great way to get a taste of Kunitz and see how his poetry evolved as his life evolved. Kunitz essentially lived through the entire century and witnessed both World Wars, the Great Depression, putting men on the moon, the rise and fall of Communism and so much of our history as a modern country. His poetry reflects it all, and it’s a unique way to view the milestones of our lives, as well as the evolution of the poet.
Highly recommend this book as a way to get to know Kunitz, and as a momentary pause to reflect on how we arrived at the 21st Century!
September 12, 2025
This review just applies to the final two collections included, which were too brief to do separately. In general, I would say these poems are solid without being standouts, though with more structural variety than in Kunitz' preceding collections. "day of foreboding," the shortest, may be my favorite; "the well fleet whale" is tragic. "proteus" and "touch me" are also strong.
Overall, I would still say my preference is for his first two volumes and, of his later style, the volume The Layers (in The Poems 1928-1978).
Overall, I would still say my preference is for his first two volumes and, of his later style, the volume The Layers (in The Poems 1928-1978).
January 19, 2023
i really wanted to like these poems more especially after the preface & all -- too many with which I failed to connect, in the end, but when it hits it hits harder than most. that experience of something unflinching & luminous beyond what my brain easily catalogues & discards as "poetry" is harder to come by in overall more consistent volumes. like "end of summer" are you kidding? the end of "journals to my daughter"? the WORM POEMS?
January 12, 2020
I guess as an untrained poet I like poems that carry more acute emotion and are more concrete than ambiguous. I didn't have two clues what most of the poems in this collection were about, and I felt no urge to re-read them. Maybe why it took me so long to get through this book. The only poem that affected me was The Wellfleet Whale. That poem got my heart beating faster.
August 29, 2025
The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz is not a clear 5-star book because I loved all the poems. Instead, it is amazing because it is one of the only SIXTY-FIVE YEAR poetry anthologies consisting of the work of only one person. So, being able to watch the style and language of the poet develop over the course of many decades was incredible.
March 1, 2017
he tries to be original ill give him that but not much
August 7, 2019
A cliché here and there (e.g., "dead of night") but overall an excellent collection.
July 4, 2022
Young Stanley wrote dull poems. Old Stanley wrote beautiful poems.
March 20, 2023
Well, take my ‘review’ with a grain of salt. I simply didn’t connect with this collection of poems. Not my cup of tea.
Want to read
June 1, 2025Cutting is for Journal for My Daughter
By Stanley J. Kunitz
By Stanley J. Kunitz
July 11, 2025
picked this book almost as random at a used book store and have loved it for 15 years. so many beautiful poems and this collection is just wonderful
August 16, 2017
Accessible and wise, humble and tender.
November 21, 2015
Kunitz is one of the greats. Though formally quite simple, his poems are prisms containing complicated and multiplying meanings:
King of the River
If the water were clear enough,
if the water were still,
but the water is not clear,
the water is not still,
you would see yourself,
slipped out of your skin,
nosing upstream,
slapping, thrashing,
tumbling
over the rocks
till you paint them
with your belly's blood:
Finned Ego,
yard of muscle that coils,
uncoils.
If the knowledge were given you,
but it is not given,
for the membrane is clouded
with self-deceptions
and the iridescent image swims
through a mirror that flows,
you would surprise yourself
in that other flesh
heavy with milt,
bruised, battering toward the dam
that lips the orgiastic pool.
Come. Bathe in these waters.
Increase and die.
If the power were granted you
to break out of your cells,
but the imagination fails
and the doors of the senses close
on the child within,
you would dare to be changed,
as you are changing now,
into the shape you dread
beyond the merely human.
A dry fire eats you.
Fat drips from your bones.
The flutes of your gills discolor.
You have become a ship for parasites.
The great clock of your life
is slowing down,
and the small clocks run wild.
For this you were born.
You have cried to the wind
and heard the wind's reply:
"I did not choose the way,
the way chose me."
You have tasted the fire on your tongue
till it is swollen black
with a prophetic joy:
"Burn with me!
The only music is time,
the only dance is love."
If the heart were pure enough,
but it is not pure,
you would admit
that nothing compels you
any more, nothing
at all abides,
but nostalgia and desire,
the two-way ladder
between heaven and hell.
On the threshold
of the last mystery,
at the brute absolute hour,
you have looked into the eyes
of your creature self,
which are glazed with madness,
and you say
he is not broken but endures,
limber and firm
in the state of his shining,
forever inheriting his salt kingdom,
from which he is banished
forever.
King of the River
If the water were clear enough,
if the water were still,
but the water is not clear,
the water is not still,
you would see yourself,
slipped out of your skin,
nosing upstream,
slapping, thrashing,
tumbling
over the rocks
till you paint them
with your belly's blood:
Finned Ego,
yard of muscle that coils,
uncoils.
If the knowledge were given you,
but it is not given,
for the membrane is clouded
with self-deceptions
and the iridescent image swims
through a mirror that flows,
you would surprise yourself
in that other flesh
heavy with milt,
bruised, battering toward the dam
that lips the orgiastic pool.
Come. Bathe in these waters.
Increase and die.
If the power were granted you
to break out of your cells,
but the imagination fails
and the doors of the senses close
on the child within,
you would dare to be changed,
as you are changing now,
into the shape you dread
beyond the merely human.
A dry fire eats you.
Fat drips from your bones.
The flutes of your gills discolor.
You have become a ship for parasites.
The great clock of your life
is slowing down,
and the small clocks run wild.
For this you were born.
You have cried to the wind
and heard the wind's reply:
"I did not choose the way,
the way chose me."
You have tasted the fire on your tongue
till it is swollen black
with a prophetic joy:
"Burn with me!
The only music is time,
the only dance is love."
If the heart were pure enough,
but it is not pure,
you would admit
that nothing compels you
any more, nothing
at all abides,
but nostalgia and desire,
the two-way ladder
between heaven and hell.
On the threshold
of the last mystery,
at the brute absolute hour,
you have looked into the eyes
of your creature self,
which are glazed with madness,
and you say
he is not broken but endures,
limber and firm
in the state of his shining,
forever inheriting his salt kingdom,
from which he is banished
forever.
March 5, 2009
Through poetry, we have the capacity to craft how each word fits into a phrase, how each phrase makes an image, and how each image ends up stairstepping towards a truth. This allows room for the poet to "love particulars, the things of this world, that leads him to universals." Kunitz gets it, and masters this idea.
In the preface to his collection, he writes: "I keep trying to improve my controls over language, so that I won't have to tell lies. And I keep reading the masters, because they infect me with human possibility." Overall, Kunitz's mastered collection reminds me that poems will never satisfy. At the same time, his honed skill in writing teaches me that such disciplined art can become an exercised reminder, or a foretaste of the day when things will be whole again.
In the preface to his collection, he writes: "I keep trying to improve my controls over language, so that I won't have to tell lies. And I keep reading the masters, because they infect me with human possibility." Overall, Kunitz's mastered collection reminds me that poems will never satisfy. At the same time, his honed skill in writing teaches me that such disciplined art can become an exercised reminder, or a foretaste of the day when things will be whole again.
May 12, 2014
In the front section titled "Reflections" Stanley Kunitz notes, "Years ago I came to the realization that the most poignant of all lyric tensions stems from the awareness that we are living and dying at once. To embrace such knowledge and yet to remain compassionate and whole – that is the consummation of the endeavor of art." I'm not certain if I agree with Kunitz, that this is the consummation of the endeavor of art, but it's a lot of fun to ponder.
Not quite my style of poetry, but I still derived pleasure and rumination from this volume.
Poems I particularly enjoyed:
* "Touch Me"
* "The Way Down
* "The War Against The Trees"
* "End Of Summer"
* "The Supper Before Last"
* "Death In Moonlight"
Not quite my style of poetry, but I still derived pleasure and rumination from this volume.
Poems I particularly enjoyed:
* "Touch Me"
* "The Way Down
* "The War Against The Trees"
* "End Of Summer"
* "The Supper Before Last"
* "Death In Moonlight"
July 2, 2021
For all of the awards—the Pulitzer Prize (1959), Bollingen Prize (1997), National Book Award (1995), and many others—bestowed on Kunitz during his long and distinguished lifetime, most of the poems in this collection seem to lack the life force that infuses the work of great poets like Dickinson, Hopkins, Yeats, and Millay—all of whom expressed great passion and incisive intellect within the confines of traditional forms and conventional metrics. That said, “The War against the Trees” deserves a special prize for being one of the best poems ever written about the immorality of environmental destruction.
Favorite Poems:
“The War against the Trees”
“The Portrait”
“The Layers”
“Touch Me”
Favorite Poems:
“The War against the Trees”
“The Portrait”
“The Layers”
“Touch Me”
September 13, 2007
I really wanted to like Stanley Kunitz. Many of my favorite poets and past teachers cite him as a mentor, so I thought I'd like him...But most of these poems struck me as resting purely on the surface of beautiful language. Many images seem to be superficial, not the sort of deep images that I crave in poetry. Do I need to read them over and over until I get at something? Please don't hate me, fellow GoodReads friends/Kunitz lovers!
March 10, 2017
MY YEAR OF RE-READING, BOOK 1
Kunitz didn't have Shapiro's or Wilbur's gift for lyric, Lowell's ear, or Kinnell's rhetorical force. But he did have a gift for lyric, ear, and rhetoric. And he did have a steadiness, dedication to the poem as a thing that should speak for itself, and sense of discipline that transcends persona that the aforementioned poets never had. They may have burned brighter. But Kunitz burned longer. And he did burn, which should mean something.
Kunitz didn't have Shapiro's or Wilbur's gift for lyric, Lowell's ear, or Kinnell's rhetorical force. But he did have a gift for lyric, ear, and rhetoric. And he did have a steadiness, dedication to the poem as a thing that should speak for itself, and sense of discipline that transcends persona that the aforementioned poets never had. They may have burned brighter. But Kunitz burned longer. And he did burn, which should mean something.
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