Strong Is Your Hold — Poems

Here in paperback for the first time is the celebrated eleventh book of poems by Galway Kinnell. The book’s title derives from Walt Whitman’s ?Last Invocation”: ?Strong is your hold O mortal flesh, / Strong is your hold O love.” In this striking collection, Kinnell gives us poems of intermingling with the natural world, love poems and evocations of sexuality, poems about his father, his children, poet friends, poet heroes, and mythic figures. Included also is ?When the Towers Fell,” his stunning requiem for those who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11. The collection also affords the singular experience of hearing the poet read his own work, with an extraordinary audio recording included on CD.

Galway Kinnell is a former MacArthur Fellow and has been state poet of Vermont. In 1982 his Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. For many years he was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University. He is currently a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. For thirty-five years--from WHAT A KINGDOM IT WAS to THE BOOK OF NIGHTMARES to THREEE BOOKS--Galway Kinnell has been enriching American poetry, not only by his poems but also by his teaching and his powerful public readings.