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robertlashley's review against another edition
4.0
MY YEAR OF RE-READING, BOOK 1
Kunitz didn't have Shapiro's or Wilbur's gift for lyric, Lowell's ear, or Kinnell's rhetorical force. But he did have a gift for lyric, ear, and rhetoric. And he did have a steadiness, dedication to the poem as a thing that should speak for itself, and sense of discipline that transcends persona that the aforementioned poets never had. They may have burned brighter. But Kunitz burned longer. And he did burn, which should mean something.
Kunitz didn't have Shapiro's or Wilbur's gift for lyric, Lowell's ear, or Kinnell's rhetorical force. But he did have a gift for lyric, ear, and rhetoric. And he did have a steadiness, dedication to the poem as a thing that should speak for itself, and sense of discipline that transcends persona that the aforementioned poets never had. They may have burned brighter. But Kunitz burned longer. And he did burn, which should mean something.
sadiehatton's review against another edition
hopeful
lighthearted
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
3.5
rivercrow's review against another edition
5.0
He who is a fierce young crier
Of poems will be tranquil as water.
My dear GR friend (and fellow-dork) Patty recommended the poetry of Robert Hass to me. Stanley Kunitz wrote the introduction to Hass's Field Guide. Kunitz's effusive praise of Hass made me both want to read Field Guide and had me in search of Kunitz's own work. Kunitz's introduction alone revealed the heart of poet. How many introductions can do that?
I looked forward to reading Field Guide and then moving on to Kunitz's Collected Poems. I received both collections from the library within days of one another. I dipped into Hass's poems and found them not quite suitable to my taste. I then decided to dig into Kunitz's Collected Poems. The back cover alone made me realize I had something special in my hands:
"The poem comes in the form of a blessing--'like rapture breaking on the mind,' as I tried to phrase it in my youth. Through the years I have found this gift of poetry to be life-sustaining, life-enhancing, and absolutely unpredictable. Does one live, therefore, for the sake of poetry? No, the reverse is true: Poetry is for the sake of the life."
Kunitz was 100 years old when he died. His published poetry spanned 75 of those years. He was an elder statesman of American Poetics. Those years and wisdom allowed him to make such bold statements as "Poetry is for the sake of life."
The collected poems gathers his life's passion from his first collection (Intellectual Things, 1930) to the beautiful "Reflections" written for these collected poems (2000) and 6 other collections of his poems. Kunitz was not a prolific writer for one whose career stretched 3/4 of a century. His work is, however, consistently brilliant and engrossing.
Kunitz spoke to me from a distance in Hass's introduction, beckoned to me on the back of this collection, grabbed hold of me with the opening reflections, and then alternately shook me and embraced me for the remainder of this amazing body of work. Throughout the collected poems I became acquainted with a soul who is immeasurably wise, deeply interested in and fascinated by the human condition, and who spoke to every aspect of my development as a man and a human being in a way that less than a handful of authors or poets ever have.
The first night I began reading the poems, I sat in bed with my wife and read the reflections to her. Perhaps it was due to us both being sleepy and in the right place, but every line seemed to resonate and put us in a collective awe.
From: Reflections--
"Years ago I came to the realization that the most poignant of all lyric tensions stems from the awareness that we are living and dying at once. To embrace such knowledge and yet to remain compassionate and whole--that is the consummation of the endeavor of art."
"Poems would be easy if our heads weren't so full of the day's clatter. The task is to get through to the other side, where we can hear the deep rhythms that connect us with the stars and the tides."
"Sometimes I feel ashamed that I've written so few poems on political themes, on the causes that agitate me. But then I remind myself that to choose to live as a poet in the modern superstate is in itself a political action."
“A badly made thing falls apart. It takes only a few years for most of the energy to leak out of a defective work of art. To put it simply, conservation of energy is a function of form.”
---
Nothing within these pages is badly made. This is a body of work that should last many years.
Reading the reviews of others I learned that many people were put off by Kunitz's early work. Many people commented that his first collection of poems was too stilted and lacks connection with reality. I worried that reading his reflections as a wise old poet and then moving back to his early years would be jarring and would lack the flow I initially read. This worry was unwarranted. I love his early poems, perhaps most of all. His first collection (Intellectual Things, 1930) is replete with gems. The next group (Passport to the War) are grittier, darker, and more wrenching, but they seem to lack some of the wonder of the first book. The latter reflect the darkness of the era.
With each subsequent stage, there is change. There is less reliance on a rhyme scheme as the years progressed. I have to say though that Kunitz's rhythm, imagery, and wisdom coupled with the early rhymes pack a punch that do not feel sing-songy in any manner.
I devoured this collection because I wanted to read it all at once. I wanted to inhale it and make it as much a part of me as my breath. I usually like to linger and savor poems, but these felt more like pieces of me that were lost and needed to be reclaimed more than something I found anew.
Kunitz's poetry feels like returning to the place that is your solace as well as your home base for adventure. It is simply a collection that feels like it was written for me and yet has so much universality that I think many people would feel that same sense of personalization.
Stanley Kunitz's body of work reminds of a Neil Young song.
There is a town in North Ontario
Dream comfort memory to spare
And in my mind I still need a place to go
All my changes were there . . .
We were Helpless, helpless, helpless, helpless
His poetry often traces the line of transformation and changes that we encounter just in being human. His early work does so with inspiration from John Donne and his later from his own life. He even self-reflects to his earlier poems in a manner that is somehow admirable and endearing more than narcissistic--perhaps one is permitted this when one's poetic life alone spans nearly 80 years. Regardless, the changes Kunitz marks somehow trace my own changes, both those I have already endured and those, oddly enough, which I have to look forward. I can only explain the resonance of changes not yet occurred as something imbued deeply into the human condition.
Regardless, when speaking of this collection, all my changes were there and I am simply helpless to the charms and beauty of this body of work.
Other endorsements:
After finishing the first section of poems (Intellectual Things, 1930), I knew that this was a collection that would be important to me until I return the dust I borrowed to exist in this world--to mangle one of S.K.'s phrases. As a result, I ordered The Collected Poems so that I would have it ASAP and thereafter. It has arrived and would be placed on my special black shelf that holds my essentials and favorites, but it is currently residing by my bed so I may read a poem or two before drifting off.
This collection has instantly moved to my "essential shelf" and will be read throughout my life.
I have always referred to only one person as S.K in the past. He being the Great Dane (no, not Scooby Doo), Soren Kierkegaard. Stanley Kunitz and the great sensei Steve Kendall are my two newest and highest ranking S.K.s.
I don't know that any of Mr. Kunitz's poems will resonate with anyone as much as they have with me. One of the mysteries and joys of why we read is to uncover gems that shine for us and to breathe new air that revives our souls. He speaks to me. More than that I cannot say.
From: Intellectual Things (1930)--
Transformation
All night he ran, his body was air,
But that was in another year.
Lately the answered shape of his laughter,
The shape of his smallest word, is fire.
He who is a fierce young crier
Of poems will be tranquil as water,
Keeping, in sunset glow, the pure
Image of limitless desire;
Then enter earth and come to be,
Inch by inch, geography.
--------
So Intricately Is This World Resolved
So intricately is this world resolved
Of substance arched on thrust of cicumstance,
The earth's organic meaning so involved
That none may break the pattern of his dance;
Lest, deviating, he confound the line
Of reason with the destiny of race,
And, altering the perilous design,
Bring ruin like a rain on time and space.
Lover, it is good to lie in the sweet grass
With a dove-soft nimble girl. But O lover,
Lift no destroying hand; let fortune pass
Unchallenged, beauty sleep; dare not to cover
Her mouth with kisses by the garden wall,
Lest, cracking in bright air, a planet fall.
--------
The Words of the Preacher
Taking infection from the vulgar air
And sick with the extravagant disease
Of life, my soul rejected the sweet snare
Of happiness; declined
That democratic bait, set in the world
By fortune's old and mediocre mind.
To love a changing shape with perfect faith
Is a waste of faith; to follow dying things
With deathless hope is vain; to go from breath
To breath, so to be fed
And put to sleep, is cheat and shame--because
By piecemeal living a man in doomed, I said.
For time with clever fingers ties the knot
Of life that is extended like a rope,
And bundling up the spinning of our though
(The ribbons and the lace
That might have made a garment for the wind),
Constricts our substance to a cipher's space.
Into the middle of my thought I crept
And on the bosom of the angel lay,
Lived all my life at once; and oh I wept
At what I could foresee;
Upon his death-soft burning plumage wept
To vie with God for His eternity.
-----
The Change
Dissolving in the chemic vat
Of time, man (gristle and fat),
Corrupting on a rock in space
That crumbles, lifts his impermanent face
To watch the stars, his brain locked tight
Against the tall revolving night.
Yet is he neither here nor there
Because tomorrow comes again
Foreshadowed, and the ragged wing
Of yesterday's remembering
Cuts sharply the immediate moon;
Nor is he always; late and soon
Becoming, never being, till
Becoming is a being still.
Here, Now, and Always, man would be
Inviolate eternally:
This is his spirit's trinity.
------
From: Passport to War (1944)--
(After the bombing of Pearl Harbor)
The Last Picnic
The guests in their summer colors have fled
Through field and hedgerow. Come, let’s pick
The bones and feathers of our fun
And kill the fire with a savage stick.
The figures of our country play,
The mocking dancers, in a swirl
Of laughter waved from the evening’s edge,
Wrote finis to a pastoral.
Now the tongue of the military man,
Summoning the violent,
Calls the wild dogs out of their holes
And the deep Indian from his tent,
Not to be tamed, not to be stamped
Under. Earth-faced, behind this grove,
Our failures creep with soldier hearts,
Pointing their guns at what we love.
When they shall paint our sockets gray
And light us like a stinking fuse,
Remember that we once could say,
Yesterday we had a world to lose.
--------------
From: Garland, Danger
End of Summer
An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.
I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones,
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.
Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part of my life was over.
Already the iron door of the north
Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their populations forth,
And a cruel wind blows.
---
From: Passing Through-The Later Poems:
Excerpt from Proteus:
From Proteus:
He was the world's supreme illusionist
taught by necessity how to melt his cage,
slipping at will through his adversaries' grasp
by self-denial, displaying one by one
his famous repertoire of shifting forms,
from lion and serpent to fire and waterfall.
But now he was heavy in his heart and languid,
sensing the time had come to leave his flock.
Must he prepare himself once more for the test?
He could not recollect the secret codes
that gave him access to his other lives.
-------
more here:
http://stanleykunitzpoetry.blogspot.com/
About SK:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/stanley-kunitz
Of poems will be tranquil as water.
My dear GR friend (and fellow-dork) Patty recommended the poetry of Robert Hass to me. Stanley Kunitz wrote the introduction to Hass's Field Guide. Kunitz's effusive praise of Hass made me both want to read Field Guide and had me in search of Kunitz's own work. Kunitz's introduction alone revealed the heart of poet. How many introductions can do that?
I looked forward to reading Field Guide and then moving on to Kunitz's Collected Poems. I received both collections from the library within days of one another. I dipped into Hass's poems and found them not quite suitable to my taste. I then decided to dig into Kunitz's Collected Poems. The back cover alone made me realize I had something special in my hands:
"The poem comes in the form of a blessing--'like rapture breaking on the mind,' as I tried to phrase it in my youth. Through the years I have found this gift of poetry to be life-sustaining, life-enhancing, and absolutely unpredictable. Does one live, therefore, for the sake of poetry? No, the reverse is true: Poetry is for the sake of the life."
Kunitz was 100 years old when he died. His published poetry spanned 75 of those years. He was an elder statesman of American Poetics. Those years and wisdom allowed him to make such bold statements as "Poetry is for the sake of life."
The collected poems gathers his life's passion from his first collection (Intellectual Things, 1930) to the beautiful "Reflections" written for these collected poems (2000) and 6 other collections of his poems. Kunitz was not a prolific writer for one whose career stretched 3/4 of a century. His work is, however, consistently brilliant and engrossing.
Kunitz spoke to me from a distance in Hass's introduction, beckoned to me on the back of this collection, grabbed hold of me with the opening reflections, and then alternately shook me and embraced me for the remainder of this amazing body of work. Throughout the collected poems I became acquainted with a soul who is immeasurably wise, deeply interested in and fascinated by the human condition, and who spoke to every aspect of my development as a man and a human being in a way that less than a handful of authors or poets ever have.
The first night I began reading the poems, I sat in bed with my wife and read the reflections to her. Perhaps it was due to us both being sleepy and in the right place, but every line seemed to resonate and put us in a collective awe.
From: Reflections--
"Years ago I came to the realization that the most poignant of all lyric tensions stems from the awareness that we are living and dying at once. To embrace such knowledge and yet to remain compassionate and whole--that is the consummation of the endeavor of art."
"Poems would be easy if our heads weren't so full of the day's clatter. The task is to get through to the other side, where we can hear the deep rhythms that connect us with the stars and the tides."
"Sometimes I feel ashamed that I've written so few poems on political themes, on the causes that agitate me. But then I remind myself that to choose to live as a poet in the modern superstate is in itself a political action."
“A badly made thing falls apart. It takes only a few years for most of the energy to leak out of a defective work of art. To put it simply, conservation of energy is a function of form.”
---
Nothing within these pages is badly made. This is a body of work that should last many years.
Reading the reviews of others I learned that many people were put off by Kunitz's early work. Many people commented that his first collection of poems was too stilted and lacks connection with reality. I worried that reading his reflections as a wise old poet and then moving back to his early years would be jarring and would lack the flow I initially read. This worry was unwarranted. I love his early poems, perhaps most of all. His first collection (Intellectual Things, 1930) is replete with gems. The next group (Passport to the War) are grittier, darker, and more wrenching, but they seem to lack some of the wonder of the first book. The latter reflect the darkness of the era.
With each subsequent stage, there is change. There is less reliance on a rhyme scheme as the years progressed. I have to say though that Kunitz's rhythm, imagery, and wisdom coupled with the early rhymes pack a punch that do not feel sing-songy in any manner.
I devoured this collection because I wanted to read it all at once. I wanted to inhale it and make it as much a part of me as my breath. I usually like to linger and savor poems, but these felt more like pieces of me that were lost and needed to be reclaimed more than something I found anew.
Kunitz's poetry feels like returning to the place that is your solace as well as your home base for adventure. It is simply a collection that feels like it was written for me and yet has so much universality that I think many people would feel that same sense of personalization.
Stanley Kunitz's body of work reminds of a Neil Young song.
There is a town in North Ontario
Dream comfort memory to spare
And in my mind I still need a place to go
All my changes were there . . .
We were Helpless, helpless, helpless, helpless
His poetry often traces the line of transformation and changes that we encounter just in being human. His early work does so with inspiration from John Donne and his later from his own life. He even self-reflects to his earlier poems in a manner that is somehow admirable and endearing more than narcissistic--perhaps one is permitted this when one's poetic life alone spans nearly 80 years. Regardless, the changes Kunitz marks somehow trace my own changes, both those I have already endured and those, oddly enough, which I have to look forward. I can only explain the resonance of changes not yet occurred as something imbued deeply into the human condition.
Regardless, when speaking of this collection, all my changes were there and I am simply helpless to the charms and beauty of this body of work.
Other endorsements:
After finishing the first section of poems (Intellectual Things, 1930), I knew that this was a collection that would be important to me until I return the dust I borrowed to exist in this world--to mangle one of S.K.'s phrases. As a result, I ordered The Collected Poems so that I would have it ASAP and thereafter. It has arrived and would be placed on my special black shelf that holds my essentials and favorites, but it is currently residing by my bed so I may read a poem or two before drifting off.
This collection has instantly moved to my "essential shelf" and will be read throughout my life.
I have always referred to only one person as S.K in the past. He being the Great Dane (no, not Scooby Doo), Soren Kierkegaard. Stanley Kunitz and the great sensei Steve Kendall are my two newest and highest ranking S.K.s.
I don't know that any of Mr. Kunitz's poems will resonate with anyone as much as they have with me. One of the mysteries and joys of why we read is to uncover gems that shine for us and to breathe new air that revives our souls. He speaks to me. More than that I cannot say.
From: Intellectual Things (1930)--
Transformation
All night he ran, his body was air,
But that was in another year.
Lately the answered shape of his laughter,
The shape of his smallest word, is fire.
He who is a fierce young crier
Of poems will be tranquil as water,
Keeping, in sunset glow, the pure
Image of limitless desire;
Then enter earth and come to be,
Inch by inch, geography.
--------
So Intricately Is This World Resolved
So intricately is this world resolved
Of substance arched on thrust of cicumstance,
The earth's organic meaning so involved
That none may break the pattern of his dance;
Lest, deviating, he confound the line
Of reason with the destiny of race,
And, altering the perilous design,
Bring ruin like a rain on time and space.
Lover, it is good to lie in the sweet grass
With a dove-soft nimble girl. But O lover,
Lift no destroying hand; let fortune pass
Unchallenged, beauty sleep; dare not to cover
Her mouth with kisses by the garden wall,
Lest, cracking in bright air, a planet fall.
--------
The Words of the Preacher
Taking infection from the vulgar air
And sick with the extravagant disease
Of life, my soul rejected the sweet snare
Of happiness; declined
That democratic bait, set in the world
By fortune's old and mediocre mind.
To love a changing shape with perfect faith
Is a waste of faith; to follow dying things
With deathless hope is vain; to go from breath
To breath, so to be fed
And put to sleep, is cheat and shame--because
By piecemeal living a man in doomed, I said.
For time with clever fingers ties the knot
Of life that is extended like a rope,
And bundling up the spinning of our though
(The ribbons and the lace
That might have made a garment for the wind),
Constricts our substance to a cipher's space.
Into the middle of my thought I crept
And on the bosom of the angel lay,
Lived all my life at once; and oh I wept
At what I could foresee;
Upon his death-soft burning plumage wept
To vie with God for His eternity.
-----
The Change
Dissolving in the chemic vat
Of time, man (gristle and fat),
Corrupting on a rock in space
That crumbles, lifts his impermanent face
To watch the stars, his brain locked tight
Against the tall revolving night.
Yet is he neither here nor there
Because tomorrow comes again
Foreshadowed, and the ragged wing
Of yesterday's remembering
Cuts sharply the immediate moon;
Nor is he always; late and soon
Becoming, never being, till
Becoming is a being still.
Here, Now, and Always, man would be
Inviolate eternally:
This is his spirit's trinity.
------
From: Passport to War (1944)--
(After the bombing of Pearl Harbor)
The Last Picnic
The guests in their summer colors have fled
Through field and hedgerow. Come, let’s pick
The bones and feathers of our fun
And kill the fire with a savage stick.
The figures of our country play,
The mocking dancers, in a swirl
Of laughter waved from the evening’s edge,
Wrote finis to a pastoral.
Now the tongue of the military man,
Summoning the violent,
Calls the wild dogs out of their holes
And the deep Indian from his tent,
Not to be tamed, not to be stamped
Under. Earth-faced, behind this grove,
Our failures creep with soldier hearts,
Pointing their guns at what we love.
When they shall paint our sockets gray
And light us like a stinking fuse,
Remember that we once could say,
Yesterday we had a world to lose.
--------------
From: Garland, Danger
End of Summer
An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.
I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones,
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.
Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part of my life was over.
Already the iron door of the north
Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their populations forth,
And a cruel wind blows.
---
From: Passing Through-The Later Poems:
Excerpt from Proteus:
From Proteus:
He was the world's supreme illusionist
taught by necessity how to melt his cage,
slipping at will through his adversaries' grasp
by self-denial, displaying one by one
his famous repertoire of shifting forms,
from lion and serpent to fire and waterfall.
But now he was heavy in his heart and languid,
sensing the time had come to leave his flock.
Must he prepare himself once more for the test?
He could not recollect the secret codes
that gave him access to his other lives.
-------
more here:
http://stanleykunitzpoetry.blogspot.com/
About SK:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/stanley-kunitz
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