Imperfect Thirst

by Galway Kinnell

Overview

Galway Kinnell's twelfth book of poems is powerful and thrilling. Imperfect Thirst includes beautiful love poems and approaches elemental subjects with a remarkable balance of good nature and holy dread: recollections of childhood, snapshots of impassive cruelty, reflections on art and nature. This energetic collection will prove once again why Galway Kinnell was one of America's masters of the art.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547348308
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	02/27/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	98
Sales rank:	927,976
File size:	509 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.

Editorial Reviews

Kinnell (When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone) launches his 12th book of poetry with a witty poem dedicated to ``The Pen''-a pen which, ``like the person who gets out of the truck, goes/ around to the rear, signals to the driver, and calls, `C'mon/ back.'" After that beginning, nearly anyone would follow this writer into the past to his quiet father who ``bent down out of the gloom like a god,'' and later, in another poem, step happily into an imagined future near ``the idea of paradise.'' Kinnell's breadth in the volume astonishes: poems range from an expression of poetic resistance to the fashionable scholarly disinterment of language in ``The Deconstruction of Emily Dickinson,'' to the delicate tableau he creates of a woman caring for her father in ``Parkinson's Disease,'' to his gleefully erudite tribute to excrement in ``Holy Shit.'' Primal themes-love, nature, mortality-emerge in newly compelling forms. In ``Rapture,'' for example, conventional poetic language is abandoned for sensuality's purer rhythms: ``Simile is useless.'' Though at times Kinnell's remarks to himself seem needlessly self-referential, when the poet speaks intimately to us, his voice is unsurpassable. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In Kinnell's 12th collection, the Pulitzer Prize winner speaks with a vibrant and sure voice. Most powerful is the poem "My Mother's R & R," a kind of fairy tale based in memory, with a fairy tale's dark, threatening side, "two small/hungry boys enflamed and driven off/by the she-wolf." Kinnell's tone is casual, his imagery evocative. These poems take chances. They confront, examine, and explore deeply the heart of life's mysteries: death, family bonds, love, aging, even bodily functions (the poem "Holy Shit" could have been left out of the collection). But the point that Kinnell (Three Books, LJ 9/15/93) makes with these poems is that it all counts, it's all important, because it's all so transitory: "Could heaven be a time, after we are dead,/of remembering the knowledge/flesh had from flesh?" Recommended for all collections.-Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, Ind.

Library Journal