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by: Stanley Kunitz
List Price: $27.95Amazon.com's Price: $21.24 You Save: $6.71 (24%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.52
EAN: 9780393050301
ISBN: 0393050300
Label: W. W. Norton & Company
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 288
Publication Date: 2000-10
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Sales Rank: 302571
Studio: W. W. Norton & Company
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
In the year of his ninety-fifth birthday, a volume celebrating the distinguished career of one of our most esteemed poets. In 1995, Stanley Kunitz received the National Book Award in Poetry for Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected. The citation for the award read in part: 'In his genius, great clarity is joined to great generosity. His work shines with humanity, humor, precision, and passion.' Now, combining both early and later poems, including Selected Poems (which won the Pulitzer Prize), Kunitz presents us with the gift of his life's work in poetry. The early poems, long unavailable in any edition, sound themes that have always engaged Kunitz: life's meaning, the relation of time to eternity, kinship with nature, and loss, most poignantly that of his father. Despite the power of his poems about loss, Kunitz ardently celebrates life. Perpetually curious, eager for fresh revelations, he fully lives up to his own advice to younger poets 'to persevere, then explore. Be explorers all your life.'
Amazon.com Review:
Stanley Kunitz's collected poems are an unassailable argument for age, experience, and impassioned observation. At 95, America's 10th poet laureate has many decades' worth of work under his belt, and his lyrics form a fine self-portrait even as they track his evolution toward the spare and simple. Kunitz's later poetry seems to effortlessly fuse feeling and form. With considerable wit, he sees into the life of things: a brook or a bird, a squirrel or a salmon is very much a part of nature, but it is also infinitely more, as anyone lucky enough to have read 'King of the River,' 'The Snakes of September,' and 'The Wellfleet Whale' knows.
Kunitz's 'Reflections,' which preface his Collected Poems, offer several modest credos. In one, he writes, 'I like to think that it is the poet's love of particulars, the things of this world, that leads him to universals.' And his work is ample proof that what Kunitz likes to think is right! In 'Robin Redbreast,' for instance, the poet--living in an empty house that will soon be his no longer and facing nothing but blank pages--rescues a bird from some belligerent jays: It was the dingiest bird
you ever saw, all the color
washed from him, as if
he had been standing in the rain,
friendless and stiff and cold,
since Eden went wrong.
Alas, a moment's complacency at his own good deed comes to a quick end. There is no need for the poet to drive home his point--he merely provides the tragic image of an old bullet hole in the robin's head, through which he catches a glimpse of 'the cold flash of the blue / unappeasable sky.' Yet Kunitz did not arrive at this level without effort, and much of the pleasure of this volume lies in witnessing the growth of the poet's mind. In his first collection, Intellectual Things (1930), the young artist seems to have spent a good deal of time luxuriating in the early Yeats, displaying a sweet tooth for allegory and archaic inversion. Perhaps thinking himself 'a fierce young crier / Of poems,' the youthful Kunitz pursued the sublime a little too relentlessly. His second book, Passport to the War (1944), is radically different, full of darkness and repudiation, its realities and anger very close to the surface. But it really isn't until The Testing-Tree, where family comes to the fore and influence is no longer cause for anxiety, that the poet finds his voice--one that has yet to desert him.
Several of Kunitz's finest, and most desolate, poems explore his father's suicide, which took place before he was born. Others, on Mark Rothko and Alexander Calder, celebrate creation in the face of immense difficulty. And there are poems, too, of resistance: this generous collection includes translations of Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and Blok, as well as his own 'Around Pastor Bonhoeffer,' which commemorates the pacifist cleric who was part of the plot to kill Hitler. Throughout there are also love songs--to nature and women. 'Route Six' makes one wonder why there isn't an official term for a poem celebrating an enduring marriage--an epithalamium with, as they say, legs. After a quarrel, Kunitz suggests to his wife that they head for the Cape, taking with them those passions 'that flare past understanding': we can stow them in the rear
along with ziggurats of luggage
and Celia, our transcendental cat,
past-mistress of all languages,
including Hottentot and silence.
In 'The Layers,' the poet asks point-blank: 'How shall the heart be reconciled / to its feast of losses?' Reconciliation, Kunitz knows, isn't possible, but his work proves that the raptures of love and art are a strong consolation. --Kerry Fried
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - Excellent collection
I had never purchased a book of poetry before but this was recommended to me and I am very glad I bought it. The collection is superb.
Rating: - The Light shines in the Darkness of Lives, But Not Here!
Never can I match Shalom Freedman of 1500+ Reviews and 60 in two weeks of July! Completing most of THE WILD BRAID, I browsed thru other Collections of Sir Stanley...He hooked me early in the midst of his neatly arranged Reflections! Since my getting stung by hearing him read, "The Layers" on NPR's Infinite Mind, I felt urged to get to writing my Oft' Postponed Autobio Reflections!
Whenever I meditate early each Morn on his infinitely inspiring poems I start with THE LAYERS from 6th Group ... Read More
Rating: - For the endurance alone - a triumph of the human spirit
These 'Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz' were put together when the poet was ninety- five years old. He now is approaching one - hundred and his birthday will be celebrated this year, also with another collection of his poetry.
There are many reasons for wanting to read such a collection. First of all, it is interesting to see what a person has done in the course of a lifetime of work. As I understand it Kunitz evolved in style from a complex Blakean kind of writing to a more mature and simple ... Read More
Rating: - Read This Collection of Poems Even If You Don't Read Poetry
I heartily recommend this book of poems, and I especially recommend it to the reader who never or rarely ever reads poetry. What a treat is in store for you.
Rating: - Great
This is a great collection of poems. I recommend the book
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