The Collected Poems

by Stanley Kunitz

Overview

"This volume may be the best that America has to offer today. Buy this book, read it, treasure it."—Philadelphia Inquirer

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. But despite the power of his poems about loss, Kunitz remains ardent in celebrating life. He fully lives up to his own advice to younger poets "to persevere, then explore. Be explorers all your life."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393322941
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/17/2002
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	871,878
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Stanley Kunitz, much-honored poet, was cofounder of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and of Poets House in New York City. He died in 2006.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

    An Old Cracked Tune

My name is Solomon Levi,
the desert is my home,
my mother's breast was thorny,
and father I had none.

The sands whispered, Be separate,
the stones taught me, Be hard.
I dance, for the joy of surviving,
on the edge of the road.

    The Layers

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my bookof transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

    The Long Boat

When his boat snapped loose
from its mooring, under
the screaking of the gulls,
he tried at first to wave
to his dear ones on shore,
but in the rolling fog
they had already lost their faces.
Too tired even to choose
between jumping and calling,
somehow he felt absolved and free
of his burdens, those mottoes
stamped on his name-tag:
conscience, ambition, and all
that caring.
He was content to lie down
with the family ghosts
in the slop of his cradle,
buffeted by the storm,
endlessly drifting.
Peace! Peace!
To be rocked by the Infinite!
As if it didn't matter
which way was home;
as if he didn't know
he loved the earth so much
he wanted to stay forever.

    Halley's Comet

Miss Murphy in first grade
wrote its name in chalk
across the board and told us
it was roaring down the stormtracks
of the Milky Way at frightful speed
and if it wandered off its course
and smashed into the earth
there'd be no school tomorrow.
A red-bearded preacher from the hills
with a wild look in his eyes
stood in the public square
at the playground's edge
proclaiming he was sent by God
to save every one of us,
even the little children.
"Repent, ye sinners!" he shouted,
waving his hand-lettered sign.
At supper I felt sad to think
that it was probably
the last meal I'd share
with my mother and my sisters;
but I felt excited too
and scarcely touched my plate.
So mother scolded me
and sent me early to my room.
The whole family's asleep
except for me. They never heard me steal
into the stairwell hall and climb
the ladder to the fresh night air.
Look for me, Father, on the roof
of the red brick building
at the foot of Green Street—
that's where we live, you know, on the top floor.
I'm the boy in the white flannel gown
sprawled on this coarse gravel bed
searching the starry sky,
waiting for the world to end.

    Hornworm: Summer Reverie

Here in caterpillar country
I learned how to survive
by pretending to be a dragon.
See me put on that look
of slow and fierce surprise
when I lift my bulbous head
and glare at an intruder.
Nobody seems to guess
how gentle I really am,
content most of the time
simply to disappear
by melting into the scenery.
Smooth and fatty and long,
with seven white stripes
painted on either side
and a sharp little horn for a tail,
I lie stretched out on a leaf,
pale green on my bed of green,
munching, munching.

Table of Contents

	Reflections	13
	from Intellectual Things (1930)
	Change	17
	Single Vision	18
	Particular Lullaby	20
	Promise Me	21
	Strange Calendar	22
	Poem	23
	Deciduous Branch	25
	The Words of the Preacher	26
	Ambergris	27
	Approach of Autumn	28
	The Pivot	29
	He	30
	Very Tree	31
	Prophecy on Lethe	33
	Lovers Relentlessly	34
	Nocturne	35
	For Proserpine	36
	Parting	37
	I Dreamed That I Was Old	38
	Night-Piece	39
	Between Me and the Rock	40
	Transformations	41
	First Love	42
	Last Words	43
	Eagle	44
	So Intricately Is This World Resolved	45
	Benediction	46
	In a Strange House	48
	Master and Mistress	49
	Organic Bloom	50
	Beyond Reason	51
	The Lesson	52
	Vita Nuova	53
	from Passport to the War (1944)
	Reflection by a Mailbox	57
	The Last Picnic	58
	Welcome the Wrath	59
	Night Letter	60
	Father and Son	62
	The Hemorrhage	64
	The Harsh Judgment	66
	Confidential Instructions	67
	The Signal from the House	68
	The Tutored Child	69
	The Economist's Song	70
	The Old Clothes Man	71
	The Fitting of the Mask	73
	The Supper Before Last	75
	The Daughters of the Horseleech	76
	Careless Love	77
	The Guilty Man	78
	Between the Acts	79
	This Day This World	80
	The Last Question	81
	How Long Is the Night?	82
	The Reckoning	83
	Open the Gates	84
	from This Garland, Danger, in Selected Poems: 1928-1958
	The Science of the Night	87
	Green Ways	89
	When the Light Falls	90
	Among the Gods	91
	As Flowers Are	92
	The Waltzer in the House	93
	Sotto Voce	94
	Grammar Lesson	95
	She Wept, She Railed	96
	Foreign Affairs	97
	The Unwithered Garland	99
	The Man Upstairs	100
	The Approach to Thebes	101
	The Dark and the Fair	103
	The Thief	105
	End of Summer	108
	Goose Pond	109
	The Dragonfly	110
	The War Against the Trees	113
	The Thing That Eats the Heart	115
	By Lamplight	116
	The Scourge	117
	Hermetic Poem	118
	To the Reader (Baudelaire)	119
	The Way Down	121
	The Class Will Come to Order	124
	The Summing-Up	126
	Revolving Meditation	127
	A Spark of Laurel	130
	from the Testing-Tree (1971)
	Journal for My Daughter	135
	An Old Cracked Tune	141
	The Portrait	142
	The Magic Curtain	143
	After the Last Dynasty	146
	The Illumination	148
	Robin Redbreast	149
	River Road	151
	Summer Solstice (Mandelstam)	153
	Tristia (Mandelstam)	154
	The Mound Builders	156
	The Customs Collector's Report	159
	The Gladiators	161
	The System	163
	Around Pastor Bonhoeffer	164
	Bolsheviks (Stolzenberg)	167
	Three Floors	168
	The Flight of Apollo	169
	King of the River	170
	The Mulch	173
	Indian Summer at Land's End	174
	Cleopatra (Akhmatova)	175
	Dante (Akhmatova)	176
	Boris Pasternak (Akhmatova)	177
	The Artist	179
	The Testing-Tree	180
	The Game	184
	from the Layers, in the Poems of Stanley Kunitz 1928-1978
	The Knot	187
	What of the Night?	188
	Quinnapoxet	190
	Words for the Unknown Makers	192
	To a Slave Named Job	192
	Sacred to the Memory	192
	Girl with Sampler	193
	Trompe l'Oeil	194
	A Blessing of Women	194
	The Catch	197
	The Crystal Cage	198
	Signs and Portents	200
	Firesticks	203
	The Lincoln Relics	204
	Meditations on Death (Ungaretti)	208
	The Quarrel	212
	The Unquiet Ones	213
	My Sisters	214
	Route Six	215
	The Layers	217
	from Next-to-Last Things (1985)
	The Snakes of September	221
	The Abduction	222
	Raccoon Journal	224
	The Old Darned Man	227
	The Scene (Blok)	229
	The Image-Maker	230
	Lamplighter: 1914	231
	Day of Foreboding	233
	Three Small Parables for My Poet Friends	234
	The Round	236
	Passing Through	238
	The Long Boat	240
	The Wellfleet Whale	241
	from Passing Through: The Later Poems (1995)
	My Mother's Pears	249
	Chariot	251
	In the Dark House	253
	Halley's Comet	256
	Hornworm: Summer Reverie	258
	Hornworm: Autumn Lamentation	259
	The Sea, That Has No Ending ...	261
	Proteus	264
	Touch Me	266
	Notes	267
	Acknowledgments	279
	Index	281

Editorial Reviews

According to Stanley Kunitz, there is no great separation between the artist and his art. Combining both early and later poems, the 95-year-old poet laureate presents us with The Collected Poems, his life's work in poetry. With each new poem we catch the poet in the act of rediscovery, recommitting himself to the single most important act of creation -- the making of a self. In an exclusive interview with B&N.com, Kunitz went on to say that "after many such remakings and rededications we arrive, if we are lucky, at a stage where we can find the self that we can bear to live with -- and even to die with. As I say in the opening lines of 'The Layers,' 'I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides...' " Kunitz's poetry reminds us that living itself is an act of creation, not only for the artist, but for all of us.

bn.com

[T]he best that America has to offer today. Buy this book, read it, treasure it.

Philadelphia Inquirer

[A]ffirms his stature as perhaps the most distinguished living American poet.

New York Times Book Review

Widely, deeply and deservedly admired, Kunitz celebrates his 95th birthday with his first comprehensive collection in decades. Kunitz's oeuvre divides neatly in half. The first half, written before the 1960s, consists of elaborately stylized, neo-Metaphysical odes and lyrics, variously evocative of Blake, Yeats, Hart Crane and Allen Tate: "Engaged in exquisite analysis/ Of passionate destruction, lovers kiss;// In furious involvement they would make/ A double meaning single." Long out of print, these earlier poems won Kunitz a Pulitzer for his 1958 Selected. His current reputation rests justly on his very different, clearer, more obviously personal late poems--contemporary monuments of visionary clarity and understated wisdom, cast in long sentences and in short free-verse lines. These entirely convincing works--many of which are found in 1995's National Book Award-winning, Passing Through, a new-and-selected--reflect on justice, politics and the Vietnam War; on parenthood, divorce and happy remarriage; and (as one might expect) on advancing age. They also bring Kunitz face to face with a cast of remarkable ghosts--among them Dante; Roman gladiators; prehistoric Americans' "earth-faced chorus of the lost"; Abe Lincoln; Jewish mystics; "the larva of the tortoise beetle"; a bevy of outsider artists; and the poet's father, who died when Kunitz was young. One lyric revisits the poet's childhood dream: "Bolt upright in my bed that night/ I saw my father flying;/ the wind was walking on my neck/ the windowpanes were crying." Other poems examine inland Massachusetts (where Kunitz grew up) and Cape Cod (where he lives); several translate the Russian modernists Mandelstam and Akhmatova. Concise and deeply affecting, the later Kunitz is easy to love, but hard to describe, since his craft consists so much in hard thought and hard-won simplicity. His works of the last few decades are permanent things; readers without Passing Through should pick up this more permanent collection. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

It's hard to quarrel with this volume, which collects seven decades' worth of stellar work from one of America's foremost poets. Direct and down-to-earth, Kunitz addresses love, loss, and the gritty everyday in poems that are remarkably consistent in style and texture from the early 1930s to the late 1990s. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

What makes this collection of a lifetime's work so valuable is the way it allows us to perceive the interconnectedness of all Kunitz has written. Each poem stands alone, but each also enriches the others . . . The pursuit of such interweavings makes of this book one long poem, in which symbols and themes recur in different contexts.
—New York Times Book Review

Robert Campbell

"[P]erhaps the most distinguished living American poet."

The New York Times Book Review