Poetry by Pulitzer Prize And Nat'l Book Award Winner Galway Kinnell STRONG IS YOUR HOLD

I only recently uncovered the elegiac genius of Galway Kinnell's (b Amer 1927-2014) clever and haunting poems on the subway with MTA's Poetry in Motion.  Kinnell is a national treasure whose poetic largess is a legacy of intuit emotion.  STRONG IS YOUR HOLD was published in 2008.  In this masterpiece collection Kinnell pays tribute to those killed "When the Towers Fell"  "Often we didn't see them, and now, not seeing them we see them."  "Some left hand in had that their fall down the sky might happen more lightly."  Kinnel dedicated STRONG IS to Walt Whitman from whose poetry he titled this collection & quotes within When the Towers... "City of the world!...Proud and passionate city".  He also wrote personal elegies to his loved ones.  Many of the poems reflects on mortality and his legacy. "Sometimes, rising from my desk thick with discarded wretched beginnings the only way I know I'm alive is my toe- and fingernails grow.  Oh what I could have written!  Maybe will have written...Tonight I will work late, then bed, then up, then...then we'll see."  The poem I first noted HIDE-AND-SEEK demonstrates his keen witticism of pitting pride against humility: "Once when we were playing hide-and-seek ant it was time to go home, the rest gave up on the game before it was done and forgot I was still hiding. I remained hidden as a matter of honor until the moon rose." His wry & poignant humor is pervasive. "Do you feel a draft? It could be a lost moment, unconnected with earth, just passing through.  Or did I forget to shut the front door?"  The depths of Kinnell grasp on the human condition expands the bounds of expressing our own emotions wrapped within our souls.  His poem WHY REGRET?  "Doesn't it outdo the pleasure of the brilliant concert to wake in the night and find ourselves holding each other's hand in our sleep?"   My favorite example of conflicting & shifting moods of glee and self-admonitions & purpose came in his poem  IT ALL CAME BACK.  Kinnell writes of the outburst of laughter at his young son's expense when the boy inadvertently sat upon his own birthday cake.  "-he was so muscled and so outraged...And it came to me:  I was one of his keepers.  His birth and the birth of his sister had put me on earth a second time with the duty this time to protect them and to help them to love themselves.  And yet here I was locked in solidarity with a bunch of adults against my own child, heehawing away."  STRONG IS YOUR HOLD is a stirring collection of poems that intermingle warring feelings that give rise to a firm grasp of what unites us and allows us to be remarkable in & of ourselves.  "Everything startles with its beauty when its assigned value has been eradicated."