Passing Bell

Paul Kane has published six collections of poems and a dozen other books, most recently Welcome Light (2016) and Renga: 100 Poems (2017). His work appears in journals and anthologies in the US, Australia, and the UK, and has been translated into French, Italian and Chinese. Kane has received a Fulbright award, Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, grants from the Mellon Foundation, a residency from the Bogliasco Foundation, and an honorary doctorate from La Trobe University for his contribution to Australian culture. He has taught at Yale University and Monash University (Australia), and is currently Professor of English and Environmental Studies at Vassar College. In 1980, he married Tina Kane, a textile conservator who worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and who, after a two-year illness with ALS, died in Australia in 2015. Kane divides his time between homes in Warwick, NY, and rural Australia.

I love the way that Paul Kane's deep and passionate sequence marks the passages of grief, its waves and recurrences. It's a genuine testament, a long love poem, a holding on and letting go, a brave and inconsolable book that is somehow consoling. I am deeply touched by it.--Edward Hirsch