Reviewed by Jessica Allen
5.7.07

When Stanley Kunitz died in May 2006 at age 100, he was a universally beloved poet; it was said he knew everybody. Throughout his long career, he mentored such poets as Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, and Louise Glück, and he once palled around with Mark Rothko, Theodore Roethke, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell. In between publishing twelve books of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Selected Poems: 1928-1958 (1958), Kunitz founded two organizations devoted to helping young artists: Poets House in New York City and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He also served as the U.S. Poet Laureate—twice. Robert Pinsky eulogized Kunitz in Slate, and The Washington Post devoted four pages to an obituary. Provincetown even declared July 29 “Stanley Kunitz Day.”

The Wild Braid, Kunitz’s last published book, is a lovely collage of lush photographs, some previously published poems, and ruminations on his two great passions—poetry and gardening. It befits a man known for his warmth and generosity. Genine Lentine edited their conversations into short vignettes with such titles as “The Lamentation Tree” and “A Bag of Earth on His Back.” Just in time for Mother’s Day comes the delightful paperback version.

Kunitz’s affair with gardening begins sometime in the 1950s, when he and his third wife, Elise Asher, vacationed in Provincetown. Smitten, they purchased a summer home there in 1962, and over the next forty years, Kunitz lovingly cultivated a harbor-side garden that would become almost as renowned as its gardener. Using lots of seaweed, he transformed “a starkly barren area with nothing growing on it, not even grass” into fertile ground. It took roughly another ten years to find the ideal balance of trees, shrubs, flowers, plants, and grasses. Eventually, however, the garden became what Kunitz wanted: “a living poem,” and a source of tremendous pleasure.

“The Wild Braid” of the title refers to the intertwining of snakes and tree roots described in the poem “The Snakes of September,” but the phrase just as easily refers to the similarities, for Kunitz, between poetry and gardening. Many of the book’s passages directly explore the links between creative pursuits. Both poems and gardens impose some order on disorder, the chaos of the unconscious and of wilderness, respectively. But the best poems, like the best gardens, do not have what Kunitz calls “straight paths” from creation to meaning. And both require a participant in order to be fully experienced: “You don’t see the garden as a whole from any point, but you begin to know it by making a tour around it. Then it becomes a garden in the mind, and you become the instrument that defines it, just as you have to create the wholeness of a poem in your mind.” The ontological experience—whether of a garden or a poem—differs from individual to individual.

Out of doors, Kunitz felt he could communicate and commune without language. “Each of us is a very sensitive keyboard,” Kunitz explained. Being outside let him receive messages from the world and from his Self, but it also let him escape from difficult realities. As a child, he roamed nearby woods, trying to shake off the specter of his dead father (he committed suicide in a public park just six weeks before his son’s birth) and, later, to heal the pain from his stepfather’s death. He mined these experiences for his poetry, as the poems Lentine has chosen for inclusion make clear. But he also elevated the more mundane to the poetic: driving to the Cape from New York City, spotting snakes or raccoons, planting a tree.

At the end of his life, Kunitz turned to nature to strengthen his belief in the interconnectedness of all beings—a belief that became all the more poignant during his serious illness. Imagining himself as part of a great, eternal life cycle gave him the courage to elegantly conceive of his death as natural—much harder to do when death is imminent. Nevertheless, even as he felt more alive, he was literally creeping closer to death, and the final few pages of the book consist of conversations between Kunitz and Lentine that show Kunitz slipping into a netherworld. He did so with a remarkable sense of calm, likening death to a dream state or out-of-body experience. “One simply cannot understand states of being,” he said. “One can try to interpret them but there is no certainty.”