Enduring Ties: Poems of Family Relationships

by Grant Hardy (Editor)

THE 128 POEMS IN Enduring Ties celebrate family life, collecting in a single anthology the human story through poetic glimpses of our most intimate and committed relationships. Organized in sections that track the course of a single life — growing up, marrying, childbearing, parenting, growing older, parting, and inheriting — these short and accessible poems are drawn from twenty-five-hundred years of world from Sappho to Nikki Giovanni and Elizabeth Bishop, from John Donne to Yehuda Amichai and James Merrill.
The ties of family life are universal, and Grant Hardy’s selection represents a multicultural experience. African American, Latino, and Asian American voices are all represented here, as are poetic traditions from around the world and through the ages, including a generous sampling from medieval China. Each poet affirms the strength and fragility of the long-term ties of kinship, the joy and pleasure set against the real possibility of disappointment and loss. And each poem in this volume is an expression of deep and abiding love, the kind that calls forth what is best in us and motivates us to keep trying.
Brief biographies of the poets and an appendix with notes on poetic form, using examples drawn from poems in the anthology, will inform readers drawn to experiencing these works again and again.

Genres: Poetry

209 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2003

About the author

Dr. Grant Hardy received a Ph.D. from Yale University in Chinese Language and Literature and a B.A. from Brigham Young University where he studied Ancient Greek.

He is Professor of History and Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Ashville. Below is a quote by Dr. Hardy taken from the "Faces of UNC" web page:

“I am interested in how people use literature to make sense of their experience, whether that be historical, personal or religious."

Reviews

[Susie · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the introduction to this anthology of poetry, Grant Hardy confesses that he is not a poet or an English teacher. He says he is a person who enjoys reading poetry and had kept a file of “favorite poems” for a long time. What he noticed about his file was that many of the poems shared a common theme – family.

The poems in this collection were written over twenty-five hundred years. There is a vast historical scope to the poems as well as an eclectic representation of poets from ancient to modern, Asian to European to Hispanic to American, Christian to Buddhist to Hindu to Jewish. We are all represented within the pages of this book of beautiful poems.

The anthology roughly follows the course of an individual life starting with Growing Up and ending with Inheriting. Other chapter headings include Marrying, Childbearing, Parenting, Growing Older, and Parting.

Some of my all-time favorite poets are represented within the pages of this book: Li-Young Lee, Jane Kenyon, Donald Hall, David Ignatow, Langston Hughes, and Naomi Shihab Nye to name a few. However, something that really fascinated me was the poetry by Asian poets who lived centuries ago. Lady Otomo of Sakanoe (700-750) laments the departure of her daughter after marriage in the poem Sent to Her Elder Daughter from the Capital. It is amazing that poetry written that long ago is still relevant today.

For those of us puzzled by poetry, Hardy has included a comprehensive guide to poetic forms. I discovered that a Sestina is the most complicated of traditional verse forms. The definition helped me to understand just how much effort Elizabeth Bishop must have put into writing her poem titled Sestina (page 17).

[Robbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection is out of print, but it contains some luminous poems about family life. Some astonishingly nice poems.