Galway Kinnell is one of America's most important poets. "Strong is Your Hold" is his first new collection since his "Bloodaxe Selected Poems" (2001), which updated his 1982 "Selected Poems", winner of Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. In the citation for the 2003 National Book Award, the judges called Kinnell 'America's preeminent visionary' whose work 'greets each new age with rapture and abundance and sets him at the table with his mentors: Rilke, Whitman, Frost.' 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.' A CD of Galway Kinnell reading all the poems is included with the book. In this striking and varied new book (which was to be the final collection he completed), he 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. 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.
