Favorite poems: Stanley Kunitz

And the just man trailed God's shining agent,
over a black mountain, in his giant track,
while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:
"It's not too late, you can still look back

at the red towers of your native Sodom,
the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows set in the tall house
where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed.

A single glance: a sudden dart of pain
stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . .
Her body flaked into transparent salt,
and her swift legs rooted to the ground.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I will never deny her,
who suffered death because she chose to turn.

Anna Akhmatova, 1922-24
Translated by Stanley Kunitz, with Max Hayward

One of my favorite Russian poets, translated by one of my favorite North American ones. Born in Odessa in 1899, Anna Akhmatova spent most of her life in St. Petersburg, but died in a sanatarium in the Moscow suburbs in 1966.

Akhmatova was part of the generation that included Boris Pasternak, Mariana Tsvetaeva, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Yesenin. The distinctive lyrical tradition she belonged to, which traces its roots back to Pushkin--another St. Petersburg poet--was carried into the late 20th century by her protege, Joseph Brodsky.

This poem comes a collection that was originally published by Little, Brown in 1973 and is now available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The 1914 portrait of Akhmatova by Nathan Altman (1889-1970) is in the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg; the photo of Akhmatova is undated but appears to be from about 1910.

Stanley Kunitz

All summer I heard them
rustling in the shrubbery,
outracing me from tier
to tier in the garden,
a whisper among the viburnums,
a signal flashed from the hedgerow,
a shadow pulsing
in the barberry thicket.
Now that the nights are chill
and the annuals spent,
I should have thought them gone,
in a torpor of blood
slipped to the nether world
before the sickle frost.
Not so. In the deceptive balm
of noon, as if defiant of the curse
that spoiled another garden,
these two appear on show
through a narrow slit
in the dense green brocade
of a north-country spruce,
dangling head-down, entwined
in a brazen love-knot.
I put out my hand and stroke
the fine, dry grit of their skins.
After all,
we are partners in this land,
co-signers of a covenant.
At my touch the wild
braid of creation
trembles.

Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006) is one of the essential American poets--a writer who extended the traditions of poetry in English that go back to Chaucer and Shakespeare while being utterly American and fully contemporary. He also exercised broad influence as a teacher, because he mentored many of the best modern U.S. poets.

Kunitz was still writing in his 90s, and the poems of his last years--this is one of them--have an extraordinary, concentrated beauty.