Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

This is a collection of Stanley Kunitz’s later poems, written from the 1970s through to the 1990s, and originally published in the USA in 1995, though making its first appearance in this country. Kunitz was born in 1905, and as Mark Strand is quoted as saying: “Most poets dry up at 50. For him to be writing poems at 90 is just incredible.” And while I’m outlining the background to the book it may be relevant to take a piece from Kunitz’s short introduction, where he says: “It disturbs me that twentieth century American poetry seems largely reconciled to being relegated to the classroom – practically the only habitat in which most of us feel secure. It would be healthier if we could locate ourselves in the thick of life, at every intersection where values and meanings cross, caught in the dangerous traffic between self and universe.”

     What is immediately noticeable about Kunitz’s poems is their clarity. A poem about Halley’s Comet gets straight to the point:

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.

And the poem moves on to describe a “redbearded preacher from the hills” claiming that the Comet marked the end of the world and the young boy worrying in case it was true. It ends by nudging the experience into a reflection on the poet still considering these things:

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.

There is something deeply appealing about work like this and it’s hard not to warm to Kunitz who, in another poem, remarks how when his marriage failed he lived alone, and was visited by the FBI “sent to investigate me as a Russian spy/ by patriotic neighbours on the river road”. And perhaps the FBI were suspicious of a man who, in a poem called ‘The System’, could write:

That pack of scoundrels
tumbling through the gate
emerges
as the Order of the State.

     This is an excellent book with much in it to entertain and instruct.