(HOST) Galway Kinnell was the first Vermont State Poet and he’s the
most nationally prominent poet writing in Vermont today. His latest collection of poems has captured the attention – and admiration – of commentator Tom Slayton.
(SLAYTON) The title of Galway Kinnell’s new book of poems, Strong is Your Hold, refers to a line from Walt Whitman: “Strong is your hold, o mortal flesh/ Strong is your hold, o love.” Thus, in Whitman’s poem, “Last Invocation,” it is our flesh and our love that hold us here on earth, that stay death a while longer.
And so it is in this latest collection of poems from Galway Kinnell, a former Vermont State poet who lives in Sheffield. He’s one of a handful of senior American poets who are generally considered to be of major importance.
Love and death, two timeless subjects of poetry, are the thematic substrata of Kinnell’s new collection of poems. And yet, that is an enormous over-simplification. Because love appears in many forms, both simple and complex, in this book, and, so does death.
One poem, for example, focuses on the death and the systematic decomposition of a meadow vole: mortality, assisted by carrion beetles. Another takes as its subject the painful death of a friend. Yet another, the horrific death and carnage, when the towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001.
Likewise, there are many different manifestations of love in Strong Is Your Hold – romantic love, sexual love, the love of aging friends, and the complex, many-faceted love that flows between parents and children.
No one has written more tenderly or accurately about parental love than Galway Kinnell. It is a subject with a thousand potential snares and pitfalls, and yet through immense verbal skill, gentle humor and a certain loving detachment, Kinnell manages to avoid sentimentality, cliches and false profundity, and plunges deeply into new perceptions and understanding about this great human mystery.
In “It All Comes Back,” for example, the poet desribes an incident in which his four-year-old son became so angry with him – for laughing at him — that he hooked his thumbs into his father’s mouth and yanked hard on his cheeks. “I felt like he might rip my whole face off,” Kinnell declares.
Suddenly he realized that he had betrayed his son’s trust – he was there to protect and help his children, he writes, and he wonders if, by laughing, he might have been striking back at his own parents for ancient wrongs and humiliations.
The intergenerational complexity of love is also the unspoken subject of the poem, “Pulling a Nail,” in which Kinnell imagines himself arm-wrestling with his father as he uses a hammer to pull a nail his father had hammered in decades earlier. He tries to hammer the nail straight after extracting it, but admits, significantly “I don’t think I will ever straighten it out.”
In a much earlier poem, Kinnell told his then-infant daughter: “The wages of dying is love.”
In this fine new collection, Strong is Your Hold, he has woven, with twenty-five poems, a beautifully complex tapestry on those twinned themes, one that is subtle, complex, beautiful, and profoundly moving.
Tom Slayton is editor-emeritus of Vermont Life magazine.