Galway Kinnell was one of America's major modern poets. This new
selection - drawing on eight collections from What a Kingdom It Was
(1960) to Imperfect Thirst (1994) - updated his 1982 Selected Poems,
which won him the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. His poetry
was always marked by precise, furious intelligence, by rich aural music,
by devotion to the things and creatures of the world, and by
transformations of every understanding into singing, universal art.
These constants appear in a dazzling range of poems: from odes of
kinship with nature to realistic evocations of urban life, from
religious quest to political statement, from brief imagistic lyrics to
extended, complex meditations. This selection shows how the traditional
Christian sensibility of his early work gave way to the sacramental,
transfiguring dimension of the later poetry, which 'burrows fiercely
into the self away from traditional sources of religious authority or
even conventional notions of personality' (Richard Gray). As Kinnell
once said: 'If you could keep going deeper and deeper, you'd finally not
be a person...you'd be a blade of grass or ultimately perhaps a stone.
And if a stone could speak, poetry would be its words.' Through the
poem, Kinnell throws off the 'sticky infusion' of speech and - like the
hunter in his celebrated poem The Bear - becomes one with the natural
world, sharing in the primal experiences of birth and death.
