Coming soon ( )

I think that I could pick this up every year. Engaging story of the poet, his craft, his garden, and his poems. ( )

This is a unique collection of scintillating poems intertwined with conversations. The poems alone are worth the price of the book. The addition of the conversations is what makes this collection so special. With gardening as the starting point the reflections touch on many topics including personal history, poetry, the creative process, and the cycle of life. The garden was, for Stanley Kunitz, a source of solace and renewal as he dealt with personal health issues and the death of his wife in the spring of 2004.

For Kunitz "a garden holds infinite possibilities. What sense of its nature, or its kingdom, is it going to convey? It represents a selection, not only of whatever individual plants we consider to be beautiful, but also a synthesis that creates a new kind of beauty, that of a complex and multiple world. What you plant in your garden reflects your own sensibility, your concept of beauty, your sense of form. Every true garden is an imaginative construct, after all."

It is similar for poetry in that the creative process yields via the imagination a work of art, a poem, a thing of beauty. Yet for Kunitz " a poem seems to have no maker at all. Poems gather their own momentum and you feel they're moving on their own. You are part of the world in which they are born and come to maturity, but they have an identity beyond the person to whom they are confiding because the poem doesn't really belong to anyone, it belongs to a great tradition. The great tradition includes what I think of as the essential spirit of the poem which belongs to centuries, not to any single moment in time." This is finally a collection of beautiful poetry, deep thoughts, and moving moments of conversation filled with meaning. ( )

The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden – Stanley Kunitz with Genine Lentine
Photographs by Marnie Crawford Samuelson

5 stars

Before his death at 101 in 2006, Stanley Kunitz engaged in a series of conversations about gardening, poetry, the creative process, and life. This is a beautiful book of related essays, poetry, and photographs of the great poet in his garden. Every word in this book feels like a distillation of great wisdom. Each sentence is very easy to understand, and yet I have to keep thinking about them. I especially appreciated the last section in which Kunitz talks specifically about approaching death as I have a dear friend who is currently suffering a slow death by cancer. These are the last lines of his poem, The Round:

I can scarcely wait till tomorrow
When a new life begins for me
As it does each day,
As it does each day.

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Kunitz in old age is a force of nature, a conduit for purity of language. The only (minor) jarring note in here is a bit of dialogue toward the end where the interviewer comes too much to the fore. The meditations on gardening, on process, on dying and living and love are nearly as lovely as the poetry. Highly recommended. ( )