Earth Angel

Although Stanley Kunitz began spending summers in Provincetown in 1957, he didn't buy a house there until 1962. It was on Commercial Street in the West End, with about 2,000 square feet of front yard. Or, rather, sandbank: It lacked even a single blade of grass.

Kunitz has long been one of America's most celebrated poets, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award and a US poet laureate. He also has long been one of America's most passionate gardeners. With much the same inspiration, diligence, and craft that he brings to bear on his verse, he transformed those 2,000 square feet. He brought in soil, laid down compost, built terraces. Marnie Crawford Samuelson's photographs attest to how gloriously he succeeded. They come from The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden, to be published next month.

"I associate the garden with the whole experience of being alive," Kunitz says in the book, "and so, there is nothing in the range of human experience that is separate from what the garden can signify in its eagerness and its insistence, and in its driving energy to live - to grow, to bear fruit."

Kunitz knows something about a driving energy to live. He will turn 100 on July 29.

On Cultivation

Why is the act of cultivating so compelling? All my life, the garden has been a great teacher in everything I cherish. As a child, I dreamed of a world that was loving, that was open to all kinds of experience, where there was no prejudice, no hatred, no fear. The garden was a world that depended on care and nourishment. And it was an interplay of forces; as much as I responded to the garden, the garden, in turn, responded to my touch, my presence. The garden isn't, at its best, designed for admiration or praise; it leads to an appreciation of the natural universe, and to a meditation on the connection between the self and the rest of the natural universe. And this can come not only from the single flower in its extravagant beauty, but in the consideration of the harmony established among all aspects of the garden's form.

The Alberta Spruce

In the first year of my garden, I planted four Alberta spruces, one at each corner. Forty years later, in the summer of 2002, after much anguish, I decided to take out the one occupying the southeast corner. It had grown to twenty feet and dominated the entrance, almost entirely blocking the path.

I watched them cut this magnificent spruce down and as it started to topple it was like watching a house burn. All those years! . . . It took maybe fifteen, twenty minutes for them to cut it down.

It came down all in one piece. The root system took longer to hack out than that one decisive cut through the trunk - one can easily sense the metaphorical resonance in that.

"The Round"

Light splashed this morning on the shell-pink anemones swaying on their tall stems; down blue-spiked veronica light flowed in rivulets over the humps of the honeybees; this morning I saw light kiss the silk of the roses in their second flowering, my late bloomers flushed with their brandy. A curious gladness shook me.

So I have shut the doors of my house, so I have trudged downstairs to my cell, so I am sitting in semi-dark hunched over my desk with nothing for a view to tempt me but a bloated compost heap, steamy old stinkpile, under my window; and I pick my notebook up and I start to read aloud the still-wet words I scribbled on the blotted page: "Light splashed ..."

I can scarcely wait till tomorrow when a new life begins for me, as it does each day, as it does each day.

Undated Journal Entry

My garden, my life,

my poems-

a planned disorder

Excerpts from The Wild Braid, by Stanley Kunitz with Genine Lentine and photographs by Marnie Crawford Samuelson (W. W. Norton & Co., May 2005). The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown will host a book-related exhibit in July.