Enduring Ties: Poems of Family Relationships

THE 128 POEMS IN Enduring Ties celebrate family life, collecting in a single anthology the human story through poetic glimpses of our most intimate and committed relationships. Organized in sections that track the course of a single life — growing up, marrying, childbearing, parenting, growing older, parting, and inheriting — these short and accessible poems are drawn from twenty-five-hundred years of world literature: from Sappho to Nikki Giovanni and Elizabeth Bishop, from John Donne to Yehuda Amichai and James Merrill.
The ties of family life are universal, and Grant Hardy’s selection represents a multicultural experience. African American, Latino, and Asian American voices are all represented here, as are poetic traditions from around the world and through the ages, including a generous sampling from medieval China. Each poet affirms the strength and fragility of the long-term ties of kinship, the joy and pleasure set against the real possibility of disappointment and loss. And each poem in this volume is an expression of deep and abiding love, the kind that calls forth what is best in us and motivates us to keep trying.
Brief biographies of the poets and an appendix with notes on poetic form, using examples drawn from poems in the anthology, will inform readers drawn to experiencing these works again and again.