Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Galway Kinnell dies in Vermont

[cali]

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Galway Kinnell died on Tuesday at his home in Vermont after battling leukemia, his wife said on Wednesday. He was 87.

Kinnell's published work spanned five decades and dealt with a wide spectrum of subjects, from the texture of urban life to immortality.

His wife, Barbara Bristol, said on Wednesday that one of Kinnell's greatest honors was being named the poet laureate of Vermont in 1989, making him the successor to Robert Frost.

"He worked very hard at it ... It meant a lot that his poetry was in the minds and heart of Vermonters," Bristol said in a telephone interview from their home in the remote town of Sheffield, in the state's Northeast Kingdom region.

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http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/29/us-people-galwaykinnell-idUSKBN0II23W20141029

Two Seasons

The stars were wild that summer evening
As on the low lake shore stood you and I
And every time I caught your flashing eye
Or heard your voice discourse on anything
It seemed a star went burning down the sky.

I looked into your heart that dying summer
And found your silent woman's heart grown wild
Whereupon you turned to me and smiled
Saying you felt afraid but that you were
Weary of being mute and undefiled

II

I spoke to you that last winter morning
Watching the wind smoke snow across the ice
Told of how the beauty of your spirit, flesh,
And smile had made day break at night and spring
Burst beauty in the wasting winter's place.

You did not answer when I spoke, but stood
As if that wistful part of you, your sorrow,
Were blown about in fitful winds below;
Your eyes replied your worn heart wished it could
Again be white and silent as the snow.

[thucythucy]

1. I saw him read

last year, and several times before that.

"The Book of Nightmares" has always been one of my favorites.

A perceptive, humane, inspired poet. He will be missed.

[cali]

2. Mine too. Ever since reading "the bear"

which has stuck with me through the years, popping oddly into my head at certain moments.

[thucythucy]

3. "How Could She Not"

How Could She Not
in memory of Jane Kenyon, 1947-1995

The air glitters. Overfull clouds
slide across the sky. A short shower,
its parallel diagonals visible
against the firs, douses and then
refreshes the crocuses. We knew
it might happen one day this week.
Out the open door, east of us, stand
the mountains of New Hampshire.
There, too, the sun is bright,
and heaped cumuli make their shadowy
ways along the horizon. When we learn
that she died this morning, we wish
we could think: how could it not
have been today? In another room,
Kiri Te Kanawa is singiing
Mozart's Laudate Dominum
from far in the past, her voice
barely there over the swishings of scythes,
and rattlings of horse-pulled
mowing machines dragging
their cutter bar's little reciprocating
triangles through the timothy.

This morning did she wake
in the dark, almost used up
by her year of pain? By first light
did she glimpse the world
as she had loved it, and see
that if she died now, she would
be leaving him in a day like paradise?
Near sunrise did her hold loosen a little?

Having these last days spoken
her whole heart to him, who spoke
his whole heart to her, might she not
have felt that in the silence to come
he would not feel any word
was missing? When her room filled
with daylight, how could she not
have slipped under a spell, with him
next to her, his arms around her, as they
had been, it may then have seemed,
all her life? How could she not
press her cheek to his cheek,
which presses itself to hers
from now on? How could she not
rise and go, with sunlight at the window,
and the drone, fading, deepening, hard to say,
of a single-engine plane in the distance,
coming for her, that no one else hears?

Galway Kinnell, from "Strong is Your Hold."

[frazzled]

4. There's a marvelous obit in the NY Times this morning

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/30/books/galway-kinnell-poet-who-went-his-own-way-dies-at-87.html?ref=obituaries&_r=0

[cali]

5. thanks. I didn't see that.

Kinnell was an active part of the Northeast Kingdom. He'll be missed in these parts- not just as a poet but as a human being.