A New Selected Poems

by Galway Kinnell

Overview

Contains selected poems from:
What a Kingdom It Was (1960)
Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock (1964)
Body Rags (1968)
The Book of Nightmares (1971)
Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980)
The Past (1985)
When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone (1990)
Imperfect Thirst (1994)

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547524498
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	02/27/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	196
Sales rank:	563,036
File size:	704 KB

About the Author

GALWAY KINNELL (1927–2014) was a MacArthur Fellow and state poet of Vermont. In 1982 his Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. For many years he was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University, as well as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. For thirty-five years—from The Book of Nightmares to Mortal Acts and, most recently, Strong Is Your Hold—Galway Kinnell enriched American poetry, not only with his poems but also with his teaching and powerful public readings.

Read an Excerpt

Excerpt

Daybreak

On the tidal mud, just before sunset, dozens of starfishes were creeping. It was as though the mud were a sky and enormous, imperfect stars moved across it as slowly as the actual stars cross heaven. All at once they stopped, and, as if they had simply increased their receptivity to gravity, they sank down into the mud, faded down into it and lay still, and by the time pink of sunset broke across them they were invisible as the true stars at daybreak.

Table of Contents

Contents

Author’s Note xi

FROM What a Kingdom It Was 1960 First Song 3 For William Carlos Williams 4 Freedom, New Hampshire 5 The Supper After the Last 9 The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World 12

FROM Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock 1964 The River That Is East 29 For Robert Frost 31 Poem of Night 35 Middle of the Way 37 Ruins Under the Stars 39 Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock 41

FROM Body Rags 1968 Another Night in the Ruins 47 Vapor Trail Reflected in the Frog Pond 49 The Burn 51 The Fly 52 The Correspondence School Instructor Says Goodbye to His Poetry Students 53 How Many Nights 54 The Porcupine 55 The Bear 59 FROM The Book of Nightmares 1971 Under the Maud Moon 65 The Hen Flower 70 The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible 74 Little Sleep’s-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight 79 Lastness 83

FROM Mortal Acts, Mortal Words 1980 Fergus Falling 91 After Making Love We Hear Footsteps 93 Saint Francis and the Sow 94 Wait 95 Daybreak 96 Blackberry Eating 97 Kissing the Toad 98 On the Tennis Court at Night 99 The Last Hiding Places of Snow 101 Looking at Your Face 105 Fisherman 106 52 Oswald Street 107 A Milk Bottle 108

FROM The Past 1985 The Road Between Here and There 113 Conception 115 The Sow Piglet’s Escapes 116 The Olive Wood Fire 117 The Frog Pond 118 Prayer 120 Fire in Luna Park 121 Cemetery Angels 122 On the Oregon Coast 123 First Day of the Future 124 The Fundamental Project of Technology 125 The Waking 127 That Silent Evening 130

FROM When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone 1990 The Tragedy of Bricks 133 The Cat 135 Oatmeal 137 The Perch 139 The Room 141 Last Gods 142 Farewell 144 When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone 146

FROM Imperfect Thirst 1994 My Mother’s R & R 159 The Man in the Chair 160 The Cellist 162 Running on Silk 164 The Deconstruction of Emily Dickinson 166 Sheffield Ghazal 4: Driving West 168 Sheffield Ghazal 5: Passing the Cemetery 169 Parkinson’s Disease 170 Rapture 172 Flies 174 Neverland 178

Editorial Reviews

Galway Kinnell's first book of poems, What a Kingdom It Was, appeared in 1960, a satisfyingly exuberant collection that seemed driven by an intelligence as witty as it was feverish. Among other things, it featured Kinnell's epic paean to New York City's Lower East Side, "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World," a 14-section chaos of styles, voices, and images that contains the line "Bury me not Bunko damned Catholic I pray you in Egypt." Over the years, Kinnell voice has settled into more measured tones, but the raw athletic delight that fueled his first poetry remains. Kinnell's newest book, A New Selected Poems, presents us with that rare opportunity -- a chance to trace the maturation of a truly distinctive and illuminating voice in poetry.

When Kinnell broke onto the scene it was as a tremendously gifted observer. What a Kingdom It Was is full of poems that are the surreal journalism of a loving eye fixed on a mad corner of a twisted and gorgeous world. Take, for example, this excerpt from "The Avenue":

The garbage-disposal truck
Like a huge hunched animal
That sucks in garbage in the place
Where other animals evacuate it
Whines

In Kinnell's early poetry, things are always in the act of doing. It is a poetry of action, a poetry in which things actually happen. It is also a poetry of fantastic words. Like Seamus Heaney, with whom he is often compared, Kinnell is a great neologist. In one poem, we hear a "roofleak whucking into a pail." In a later poem, we learn that "scritch" is the sound a pen makes writing poetry.

Kinnell's second book, here represented by eight poems, was Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock. A sorrowful tone invades these poems, as it does in a great deal of Kinnell's work. But Kinnell's sorrow is one that never accepts itself. He never seems to dwell. Always the desolation and heartbreak of the poems is tinged with the possibility of redemption. The title poem of the book, one of the collection's finest, chronicles a dawn trip up Mount Monadnock to pick flowers. Kinnell writes,

The last memory I have
Is of a flower that cannot be touched,

Through the bloom of which, all day,
Fly crazed, missing bees.

This "flower that cannot be touched" is a mystical predicament that haunts his poems. Forgotten are the flowers that could be touched, and were, and picked. All that remains is the image of this unattainable bloom, which itself contains, "crazed, missing bees." And like all great poets Kinnell has a knack for the opaque line, the line that cannot be touched at first. The adjective "missing" in this line throws us when we read it, as it is not a use we are familiar with. We assume that there is something in the bloom that is missing bees. Only at a second or third reading does the meaning reveal itself, like something in nature.

The poem ends with a meditation on a single flower in a forest. "Its drift," muses the poet, "is to become nothing." It is clear that Kinnell might not make the most productive flower herder in the wood. He writes,

In its covertness it has a way
Of uttering itself in place of itself
Its blossoms claim to float in the Empyrean

The appeal to heaven breaks off.
The petals begin to fall, in self-forgiveness.
It is a flower. On this mountainside it is dying.

Never one to state directly what he intends to mean, Kinnell here turns the flower, the pursued object of the poem, again into the thing that cannot be had. The flower turns away from the herder, and dies, in self-forgiveness. One gets the sense that the poet was holding his breath, knowing he was wandering among sacred happenings.

A beautiful short poem in the third book here collected ruminates on the poet's lost loves, the "ashes of old volcanoes." Having traced a leisurely course over some old nostalgic ground, Kinnell comes to this,

And yet I can rejoice
that everything changes, that
we go from life
into life,

and enter ourselves
quaking,
like the tadpole, its time come, tumbling toward the slime.

This is characteristic of a great deal of Kinnell's sentiment. He rarely skirts a sorrowful thought or memory, but rather he lunges at it, takes it in his arms, unfolds each corner of it, lays it bare before us, and then comes to an "and yet." Always there is a sense of hope that springs from an understanding taken from the pathos. Yet even this hope is seldom left to serve as an uncomplicated finale. Though this poem must be said to end on a redemptive note, its literal end is in a tumble toward the slime.

In the more recent poems in this collection, Kinnell's voice softens and simplifies. He has several wonderful poems in later books about his son Fergus, including the oft-anthologized "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps," a poem about how Fergus, wakened by the sound of his parents' lovemaking, would appear in the doorway and crawl into bed with them, propelled by "habit of memory"to the ground of his making,/sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,/this blessing love gives again into our arms."

It is a pleasure to have here collected a great body of life-spanning work and to be able to watch as Kinnell's distinctive voice slowly pares itself down, in self-forgiveness, its drift to become nothing.

—Jacob Silverstein

bn.com

Kinnell's Selected of 1982 won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award; this new retrospective contains many of the same poems, along with ample selections from the three books that have appeared in the interim (the most recent was 1994's Imperfect Thirst). Kinnell's earliest efforts, in which the poet attempted a more formal, Yeats-inflected style, are omitted completely, but the book presents an adequate cull of Kinnell's ambitious work from the '60s and '70s, including selections from What a Kingdom It Was (1960), Body Rags (1968) and Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980) that differ from the '82 selection. Exploring ideas of consciousness and mortality, the deeply Romantic poems of this period typically develop in short, numbered sections full of dark imagery: "I have come to myself empty, the rope/ strung out behind me/ in the fall sun/ suddenly glorified with all my blood." Like his deep-image peers Robert Bly and James Wright, Kinnell often seeks transcendence through immersion in nature: "Across gull tracks/ And wind ripples in the sand/ The wind seethes. My footprints/ Slogging for the absolute/ Already begin vanishing." Kinnell's later work maintains a similar mode in lyrics composed of long, single stanzas. Elemental as ever, these poems forcefully evince Kinnell's longstanding themes of human extremity--birth, death, sex--but frequently veer into gender-based bathos and heavy-handed lust: "She takes him and talks/ him more swollen. He kneels, opens/ the dark, vertical smile/ linking heaven with the underneath." At this stage in the poet's career, readers might have been better served by a collected volume spanning his entire output, but this well-balanced retrospective provides an appropriate overview of Kinnell's achievements. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Kinnell is a poet of the rarest ability, the kind who comes once or twice in a generation, who can flesh out music, raise the spirits and break the heart.

Boston Globe

"His most shimmering work . . . 'A New Selected Poems' . . . showcaswes his highest achievements."



The San Diego Union-Tribune

"Kinnell's New Selected handsomely displays thirty years of consistently astounding and inventive contributions to poetry." Book Magazine

" . . . one of the few truly indispensable volumes of poetry to appear so far this year . . ." The St. Paul Pioneer Press

"Kinnell is a poet of the rarest ability, the kind who comes once or twice in a generation, who can flesh out music, raise the spirits and break the heart." Boston Globe

"Elemental as ever, these poems forcefully evince Kinnell's longstanding themes of human extremeity—birth, death, sex—but frequently veer into gender-based pathos and heavy-handed lust." Publishers Weekly —

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