The Nearness of You

by Carolyn Kizer

'The Nearness of You' is a companion volume to 'Mermaids in the Poems for Women', and Carolyn Kizer's first book since receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1985. Collecting poems from earlier out-of-print volumes in addition to new poems, the contents include poems for lovers, friends, and fathers.

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1986

About the author

Poet, essayist, and translator Carolyn Kizer was born in 1925 in Spokane, Washington. Raised by a prominent lawyer and highly educated mother, Kizer’s childhood was suffused with poetry. Of her development as a poet, she noted to the Poetry Society of America: “My parents were both romantics: father favored the poems of [John] Keats; mother went for [Walt] Whitman. No evening of my childhood passed without my being read to. But I think my choices of [Gertrude] Stein and [George Bernard] Shaw show that my tastes were different. I remember that when I was eleven or twelve I came storming home from school demanding, ‘Why didn't you ever tell me about [Alexander] Pope and [John] Dryden?’ They were stunned. Our library, copious as it was, didn't contain the works of either. These were lasting influences. I have continued to prefer, and write, poems that have what you might call ‘a sting in the tail.’ Add Catullus and Juvenal. I adored wit, irony, and intellectual precision.” Kizer’s work is known for just those traits. From her early poems in The Ungrateful Garden (1961) to the Pulitzer-prize winning Yin: New Poems (1984) to such later works as Pro Femina (2000), which satirizes liberated women writers by mimicking the hexameter used by the ancient misogynist poet Juvenal, and her retrospective Calm, Cool, and Collected: Poems 1960-2000 (2001), Kizer’s work has received acclaim for its intellectual rigor, formal mastery, and willingness to engage with political realities. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “Carolyn Kizer is a kind of institution... For over 40 years, she's made poems with a stern work ethic of literary thought and linguistic scrupulousness.” In an interview with Allan Jalon for the Los Angeles Times, Kizer described her own style: “I’m not a formalist, not a confessional poet, not strictly a free-verse poet.” Jalon described Kizer as, “Tough without being cold, sometimes satirical (she’s a great admirer of Alexander Pope),” and noted that “her work expresses a worldly largeness that repeatedly focuses on the points at which lives meet. ‘That’s my subject,’” concluded Kizer. “No matter how brief an encounter you have with anybody, you both change.”

Reviews

[Patricia Murphy]

Surf sounds reminding us that good decay surrounds us: fourth which pounds on flesh or stone, the slow assassination of the years.

He will read for years without looking up until your childhood is over.

[Ann Michael]

Although her early poems garnered Kizer many awards, I prefer her later work. This book is an anthology of selections from earlier books that went out of print. I'm impressed more by her style than her content in this collection.

[Douglas]

I am amazed continually, by her unapologetic creative, lucid mind.