Fall Poetry Books

From PoetryFoundation.org, a review of some new poetry books coming out this fall, including the first book from Galway Kinnell in 10 years.

There are a couple of Kinnell poems in the new American Poetry Review, which I quite liked, so I'm looking forward to this new book.

Strong Is Your Hold, Galway Kinnell’s 11th book—his first in more than 10 years—shows him in an elegiac, retrospective mode:

I, who so often used to wish to float free
of earth, now with all my being want to stay

Kinnell writes as movingly as ever about family, marriage, sex, and friendship; stone tables, old nails, blueberry thickets, garter snakes anchor us in his world. “When the Towers Fell” is his response to 9/11; “Shelley” a striking meditation on one poet’s disenchantment with another. Kinnell’s work shows how the ideal of civic humanism continues to find its poets.

Other poets reviewed include Mark Strand, Alice Notley, Martín Espada, Lynda Hull, James Fenton, and Tomas Tranströmer.

Check out the whole review.