Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy (16 page)

Jaan Kaplinski
(
b
. Tartu, Estonia, 1941) is one of Europe’s major poets, and one of his country’s best-known writers and cultural figures. His philosophical poetry shows the influence of European Modernism, classical Chinese poetry and Buddhist philosophy. Also a linguist, translator, sociologist and ecologist, he lectured on the history of Western civilisation at Tartu University and was a member of the Estonian parliament in 1992-95. His essays on cultural transition and the challenges of globalisation are published across the Baltic region.
‘The washing never gets done…’ [87].

Doris Kareva
is one of Estonia’s leading poets. Born in Tallinn in 1958, she studied Roman-Germanic philology at Tartu University. She has published many collections of poetry, her work has been translated into over 20 languages, and she is herself a distinguished translator who has translated the work of writers such as Akhmatova, Emily Dickinson, Gibran, Kabir, Auden, Brodsky, Beckett and Shakespeare into Estonian. Her
Shape of Time
[
12] is a book-length sequence composed like a piece of music in three movements. In her introduction to its English edition (2010), Penelope Shuttle writes: ‘Doris Kareva observes the anguish of existence and experience in a style that is pared-back, bone-clean, needle-sharp. Her work has indeed the notation of the music of inwardness, of its despairs and its mediating flashes of illumination. And thus her poetry has its being in a time and place where past, present and future exist simultaneously.’

Jackie Kay
(
b
. Edinburgh, 1961) was an adopted child of Scottish/ Nigerian parentage brought up by a white Communist couple in Glasgow, the background of her first book of poems,
The Adoption Papers
(1991). Her poetry draws on her own life and the lives of others to make a tapestry of voice and communal understanding. She has published several books of poetry, two collections of short stories, a novel, a memoir, plays and books for children.
‘Darling’ [117].

Brendan Kennelly
is an Irish poet, critic and dramatist who taught at Trinity College Dublin for over 30 years. Born in 1936, he grew up in the village of Ballylongford in Co. Kerry, and most of his work is concerned with the people, landscapes, wildlife and history of Ireland, and with language, religion and politics. Best-known for three controversial poetry books,
Cromwell
(1983),
The Book of Judas
(1991) and
Poetry My Arse
(1995), he is a much loved public figure in Ireland, and a popular guest on television programmes. His poem ‘Begin’ [
26] was widely circulated by Irish Americans in the aftermath of 9/11, and Meryl Streep chose to read it at the launch reading for the American edition of
Staying Alive
in New York in 2003. ‘His poems shine with the wisdom of somebody who has thought deeply about the paradoxical strangeness and familiarity and wonder of life’ [Sister Stanislaus Kennedy].

Jane Kenyon
(
b
. Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1947-95) was an American poet who fought depression and other illnesses for much of her life. Her quietly musical poems are compassionate meditations intently probing the life of the heart and spirit. Observing and absorbing small miracles in everyday life, they grapple with fundamental questions of human existence.
‘Otherwise’ [20], ‘Happiness’ [84].

Galway Kinnell
(
b
. Providence, Rhode Island, 1927) is an American poet whose diverse work ranges from odes of kinship with nature to realistic evocations of urban life, from religious quest to political statement, from brief imagistic lyrics to extended, complex meditations. Many of his poems examine the effects of personal confrontation with violence and inevitable death, attempts to hold death at bay, the plight of the urban dispossessed, and the regenerative powers of love and nature. He is ‘America’s pre-eminent visionary’, and his poetry ‘greets each new age with rapture and abundance [and] sets him at the table with his mentors: Rilke, Whitman, Frost’ [National Book Award citation, 2003].
‘After Making Love We Hear Footsteps’ [54].

Stanley Kunitz
(
b
. Worcester, Massachusetts, 1905-2006) was a highly influential American poet, editor, translator and teacher
committed to fostering community amongst artists. His poetry is autobiographical but also fiercely visionary. Drawing on Jungian symbolism, he engaged with personal tragedy and public conscience to produce a resilient poetry of testing wisdom. His last work, published on his 100th birthday, was
The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden
(2005), a gathering of poems and photographs from the garden he created over 40 years at his summer home in Provincetown, Cape Cod, interwoven with Kunitz’s reflections on poetry, nature, life, death and the creative process.
‘The Layers’ [29].

Philip Larkin
(
b
. Coventry, 1922-85) was an influential and popular English poet, the leading figure in the ‘Movement’ group whose plain-speaking, descriptive poetry using traditional forms was the dominant poetic mode in British poetry of the 1950s and early 60s. His main themes are love, marriage, freedom, destiny, loss, ageing and death. Influenced by Yeats, Eliot, Auden and Hardy, Larkin was a late Romantic lyric poet who evolved a persona suited to his pessimistic postwar outlook on life: dry, sceptical, modest and unshowy, thinking aloud in an apparently commensensical fashion, yet also honest, emotional and capable of rich surprises of thought and imagery. Also a novelist and jazz critic, he worked in Hull in the university library for the last 30 years of his life.

Seamus Heaney calls Larkin’s ‘Aubade’ [
112] ‘the definitive post-Christian English poem, one that abolishes the soul’s traditional pretension to immortality’, yet an absence of life after death is as questionable as its presence. Larkin’s poem copes with the eternal subject of death, says Czesław Miłosz, ‘in a manner corresponding to the second half of the twentieth century’, and yet it ‘leaves me not only dissatisfied but indignant […] poetry by its very essence has always been on the side of life. Faith in life everlasting has accompanied man in his wanderings through time and has always been larger and deeper than religious or philosophical creeds.’ Heaney says that in imagining death, poetry brings human existence into a fuller life. [
The Redress of Poetry
(1995).]
‘An Arundel Tomb’ [64], ‘Aubade’ [112].