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Stanley Kunitz wrote “My Mother’s Pears” after visiting his childhood home in Worcester. The house will be open for tours Oct. 10- 11. (Cheryl Richards) |
Shelf Life
Tour of poet’s home
Poet Stanley Kunitz, born and raised in Worcester, knew sorrow. Six weeks before he was born in 1905, his father committed suicide. His mother remarried, but Kunitz was still a boy when his stepfather died.
After earning a degree at Harvard, Kunitz taught at a number of colleges and universities, all the while writing poems. In 1959, he won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. At the age of 90, he won a National Book Award and was named US poet laureate at 95. Kunitz, who died at the age of 100, was devoted to mentoring the next generation of poets. He was a founder of Poets House in New York City and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
Many decades after he left Worcester, Kunitz returned to his boyhood home at 4 Woodford St. The new owners, Greg and Carol Stockmal, recognized him and invited him in. The pear tree Kunitz and his mother had planted in the backyard years before was still bearing fruit. The Stockmals gave Kunitz a box of pears from the tree and Kunitz dedicated his poem “My Mother’s Pears” to them.
Earlier this year the house was designated a literary landmark. Carol Stockmal, in conjunction with Footsteps in History and the Worcester County Poetry Association, is opening the house for tours from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Oct. 10 and 11.
Writers gather in Vt.
More than 30 authors, including a novelist whose debut work has made quite a splash, will take part in the four-day Brattleboro Literary Festival that begins Thursday in Brattleboro, Vt. Helen Simonson’s first novel, “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand,” a charming multicultural romantic comedy set in an English village, has been roundly embraced by reviewers, one of whom wrote: “My only real concern now is: How long will it take Simonson to write her next novel?”Also on tap is a session with two keen observers of the animal world. Biologist Bernd Heinrich’s recent book “The Nesting Season” looks at birds and monogamy. Anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas is the author of “The Hidden Life of Deer” and “The Hidden Life of Dogs.” Details at brattleboroliterary festival.org.
Rona Jaffe winner
Jamaica Plain resident Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is one of six emerging writers awarded $25,000 from the Rona Jaffe Foundation. The money will buy her time to work on her first book, which will combine memoir with an inquiry into a murderer’s past.In a statement on the foundation’s website, she explained the origins of her work-in-progress: “In 2003, as a Harvard Law student who passionately opposed the death penalty, I took a job defending murderers in Louisiana, one of whom, I knew, was a sex offender. I had grown up being sexually abused, and to me this man was the worst of the worst — and the ultimate test of my commitment.’’
Coming out
■“Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To” by Sian Beilock (Free Press)■“White House Diary” by Jimmy Carter (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
■“Rival Rails: The Race to Build America’s Greatest
Pick of the week
Dale Szczeblowski of Porter Square Books in Cambridge recommends “American Caesars” by Nigel Hamilton (Yale University): “Hamilton uses Suetonius’s ‘The Twelve Caesars’ as a conceit to organize compact portraits of American presidential administrations from FDR through George W. Bush. Because Hamilton, is unafraid, like his model, to make subjective judgments regarding the personal and professional lives of these leaders of what he calls the ‘American Empire,’ his book makes compelling reading.”Jan Gardner can be reached at JanLGardner@yahoo.com. 
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