This image is the cover for the book Strong Is Your Hold

Strong Is Your Hold

In this acclaimed poetry volume, the Pulitzer and National Book Award–winner explores lifelong love and the invisible boundary between life and death.

Over his long and prolific career, Galway Kinnell established himself as one of America’s greatest and most popular poets. In 2006, after a decade-long pause in creative output, he delivered what would become one of his last and most celebrated collections, Strong Is Your Hold.

The book’s title derives from Walt Whitman’s “Last Invocation”: “Strong is your hold O mortal flesh, / Strong is your hold O love.” In this collection, Kinnell gives us poems of intermingling with the natural world, love poems and evocations of sexuality, poems about his father, his children, poet friends, poet heroes, and mythic figures. Included also is “When the Towers Fell,” his stunning requiem for those who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11.

This eBook edition of Strong Is Your Hold does not include a CD or audio download.

Galway Kinnell

Galway Kinnell is a former MacArthur Fellow and has been state poet of Vermont. In 1982 his Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. For many years he was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University. He is currently a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. For thirty-five years--from WHAT A KINGDOM IT WAS to THE BOOK OF NIGHTMARES to THREEE BOOKS--Galway Kinnell has been enriching American poetry, not only by his poems but also by his teaching and his powerful public readings.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (hmhbooks.com)