LitStaff Picks: The Books We Are Most Passionate About
Collected Poems
Stanley Kunitz
I was first introduced to Stanley Kunitz’s poetry while rifling through an anthology for an English Comp class. Though Kunitz had served as the Poet Laureate, I’d never heard of him.
As soon as I could, I bought his Collected Poems.
I still have my battered, dog-eared volume, full of notes in the margin and pink highlighting. I pull it out when I’m adrift, when I’m low, when I feel I’ve lost myself or some perspective essential to what it means to be me. In this small volume is encapsulated the joys and sorrow of humanity, of love, of loss, of fear and hope.
From his First Love:
At his incipient sun
The ice of twenty winters broke,
Crackling, in her eyes.
From the Testing Tree:
In a murderous time
the heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.
It is necessary to go
through dark and deeper dark
and not to turn.
Kunitz’s poems are a celebration of life: the mystery, the anguish, the love, the hate, the transience of youth, the promises made and broken, the children you pray for, the spouses you love and then lose…If I had only one book, this would be it.
And one last excerpt, from The Abduction:
Our lives are spinning out
from world to world;
the shapes of things
are shifting in the wind.
What do we know
beyond the rapture and the dread?
-Jennifer Orozco
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