Strong is Your Hold

With QR code for audio recording by Galway Kinnell

Galway Kinnell was one of America's major modern poets. Strong is Your Hold was the final collection he published after his Bloodaxe Selected Poems (2001), which updated his 1982 Selected Poems, winner of Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

The title of his eleventh collection comes from Walt Whitman’s ‘Last Invocation’: ‘Strong is your hold, O mortal flesh, / Strong is your hold, O love.’

In this striking and varied new book, he gave 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. There is also anger and sorrow at human destructiveness, and Strong Is Your Hold includes ‘When the Towers Fell’, his stunning requiem for those who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11 in direct view of his New York apartment.

Kinnell once said: ‘What troubles me is a sense that so many things lovely and precious in our world seem to be dying out. Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of what’s to come.’ And: ‘Maybe the best we can do is do what we love as best we can.’ Strong Is Your Hold is a powerful testament to Galway Kinnell’s loving view of the world.

'There are few others writing today in whose work we feel so strongly the full human presence. His language tantalises us with a foretaste of meaning, an underlying emotional logic that recalls Whitman's I am the man, I suffer'd, I was there. Like all good poetry, his finest poems attract and mesmerise us before we really understand them.' – Morris Dickstein, New York Times Book Review

This book was originally published with an audio CD of Galway Kinnell reading all the poems. This edition includes a QR code giving online access to the same audio recording, enabling the reader to listen to Galway Kinnell's beautiful reading and introduction while reading the book.

Galway Kinnell was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1927. He made his living mostly from teaching from 1949 to 2005, in France, Iran and Australia as well as at colleges and universities across America. He was Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University for many years, and served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. In 1982 his Selected Poems won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. An updated and expanded edition was published as Selected Poems by Bloodaxe in Britain in 2001. He also published several translations, including books by Goll, Lorca, Rilke and Villon, and Yves Bonnefoy’s On the Motion and Immobility of Douve in the Bloodaxe Contemporary French Poets series (1992). His final collection, Strong Is Your Hold, published with an audio CD in 2007 by Bloodaxe, includes his long poem 'When the Towers Fell', a requiem for those who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11 in direct view of his New York apartment. He died in 2014.