Selected Poems

by Galway Kinnell

Read A New Selected Poems to catch Galway Kinnell's myriad fine-tunings of poems decades old; read it for the pleasure of watching his early formalism blossom into long, joyous, almost Whitmanesque lines; but most of all, read it for the eagle's-eye view it provides of one of our finest American poets. Well into his 70s, Kinnell is still producing poetry as visceral as it is philosophical, forging the universal from the fleshy, messy specifics of life. " Lieutenant! / This corpse will not stop burning! " comes the cry in "The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible," a remarkable war poem that literally embodies his political anger. Throughout A New Selected Poems , which Kinnell has culled from eight previous collections spanning 24 years, that corpse burns fiercely, fiercely, as if to heed the poet's own warning from "Another Night in the Ruins": How many nights must it takeone such as me to learnthat we aren't, after all, madefrom that bird that flies out of its ashes,that for usas we go up in flames, our one workisto open ourselves, to bethe flames?Kinnell is a poet who feels life most keenly as it slips through his fingers. Nothing lasts, but this is less cause for lament than for celebration; after all, he tells us, " the wages / of dying is love. " Before we break out the booze and have ourselves a ball, however, there are the poems from his brutal Book of Nightmares to consider, with their apocalyptic howling; his Vermont poems, with their "silent, startled, icy, black language / of blackberry eating in late September"; the noise and clatter of his early New York poems, "Where instants of transcendence / Drift in oceans of loathing and fear..." Kinnell is a poet with a leg in each world, one up above where the bears and porcupines live, and one down below, in what we might call the imaginative underworld. Witness the stunning progression of "When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone," in which he is both Orpheus and a misanthropic Eurydice, singing himself back to the company of the human. How glad we are that Kinnell failed to look back! In the tender "Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight," the poet advises his infant daughter, "Kiss / the mouth / that tells you, here, / here is the world. " After reading these poems, you might feel like doing the same. --Mary Park

Genres: Poetry, Classics, The United States Of America, Literary Fiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Kinnell studied at Princeton University, graduating in 1948. He later obtained a Master's degree from the University of Rochester.

As a young man, Kinnell served in the US Navy and traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East. His first volume of poetry, What a Kingdom It Was, was published in 1960.

Kinnell became very involved in the U.S. civil rights movement upon his return, joining CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) as a field worker and participating in a number of marches and other civil actions.

Kinnell was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for Selected Poems (1980), a MacArthur Fellowship, a Rockefeller Grant, the 1974 Shelley Prize of the Poetry Society of America, and the 1975 Medal of Merit from National Institute of Arts and Letters. He served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007.

Reviews

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Galway Kinnell - 1927-2014, RIP, died this fall at 87. He was from the time I began liking poetry one of my favorite poets, and remains so. With Robert Bly, James Wright, Gary Snyder, and many others I adored, he was one of the neo-Romantic children of Walt Whitman, and like them, he combines a mystical passion for nature.

His themes were death, mortality, the body, relationships. In all this work he has this ability to be both spiritual and visceral. Like Whitman, he also celebrates the city, but for him, trees, water, mountains, birds, animals, are central. Mary Oliver has some affinities with him, that passionate intensity about the natural world. Getting us to attend to watching, listening, through a kind of Buddhist meditation, but there's also something muscular in his language, his tough, unsentimental approach to life and language. I heard him read a couple times, once in Grand Rapids, Michigan, once in Ann Arbor, close to a time Seamus Heaney read there.

KInnell's poems about William Carlos Williams and Robert Frost reveal this tough unsentimentality. He was never an academic poet; he was unpretentious, a midwestern poet who wrote of NYC and Washington State. There are fun poems about teaching, and sweet poems like "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps," but "The Bear" is one of his greatest poems. RIP, Galway. You're still with me til the end.

The Bear

1

In late winter
I sometimes glimpse bits of steam
coming up from
some fault in the old snow
and bend close and see it is lung-colored
and put down my nose
and know
the chilly, enduring odor of bear.

2

I take a wolf's rib and whittle
it sharp at both ends
and coil it up
and freeze it in blubber and place it out
on the fairway of the bears.

And when it has vanished
I move out on the bear tracks,
roaming in circles
until I come to the first, tentative, dark
splash on the earth.

And I set out
running, following the splashes
of blood wandering over the world.
At the cut, gashed resting places
I stop and rest,
at the crawl-marks
where he lay out on his belly
to overpass some stretch of bauchy ice
I lie out
dragging myself forward with bear-knives in my fists.

3

On the third day I begin to starve,
at nightfall I bend down as I knew I would
at a turd sopped in blood,
and hesitate, and pick it up,
and thrust it in my mouth, and gnash it down,
and rise
and go on running.

4

On the seventh day,
living by now on bear blood alone,
I can see his upturned carcass far out ahead, a scraggled,
steamy hulk,
the heavy fur riffling in the wind.

I come up to him
and stare at the narrow-spaced, petty eyes,
the dismayed
face laid back on the shoulder, the nostrils
flared, catching
perhaps the first taint of me as he
died.

I hack
a ravine in his thigh, and eat and drink,
and tear him down his whole length
and open him and climb in
and close him up after me, against the wind,
and sleep.

5

And dream
of lumbering flatfooted
over the tundra,
stabbed twice from within,
splattering a trail behind me,
splattering it out no matter which way I lurch,
no matter which parabola of bear-transcendence,
which dance of solitude I attempt,
which gravity-clutched leap,
which trudge, which groan.

6

Until one day I totter and fall—
fall on this
stomach that has tried so hard to keep up,
to digest the blood as it leaked in,
to break up
and digest the bone itself: and now the breeze
blows over me, blows off
the hideous belches of ill-digested bear blood
and rotted stomach
and the ordinary, wretched odor of bear,

blows across
my sore, lolled tongue a song
or screech, until I think I must rise up
and dance. And I lie still.

7

I awaken I think. Marshlights
reappear, geese
come trailing again up the flyway.
In her ravine under old snow the dam-bear
lies, licking
lumps of smeared fur
and drizzly eyes into shapes
with her tongue. And one
hairy-soled trudge stuck out before me,
the next groaned out,
the next,
the next,
the rest of my days I spend
wandering: wondering
what, anyway,
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?

[Jenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Did you know Galway Kinnell was active in the Civil Rights movement, jailed in Louisiana for his role in voter registration activities? I didn't know that until I read the excerpts from Kinnell's long poem "The Last River" that are included in this 1982 compilation. "The Last River" is, interestingly, entirely excluded from Kinnell's subsequent compilation A New Selected Poems, issued in 2011: although Hayden Carruth called it the "strongest single piece of writing the [Civil Rights] movement has produced," Kinnell himself was not satisfied with the poem, as he explained in an interview--

"I don't think it's as good a poem as it should be, and, yet, I don't see how I could fix it now. When I went down there to work on in the South, I thought it would be unseemly for me to 'use' the situation down there as material for art, and I decided not to write a word while I was there. I put aside everything having to do directly with poetry and just did my work as a Civil Rights worker.... It was ignorant idealism. I should have gone down there thinking that my job was two-fold, one was to do the work of voter registration and desegregation and the other was to write about all this to be as informative as possible through poetry or any other form of writing my pen might have taken. Later, I tried to write about it, but what I wrote lacked the life that it might have had originally.... Instead of invoking the Inferno, I now think I should have taken a surrealistic approach and simply treated the whole world as hell. It was hell."

Here are some other things I learned from this book:

Galway Kinnell on prayer:

"as though a prayer has ended
and the bit of changed air
between the palms goes free
to become the glitter
on some common thing that inexplicably shines" (from "The Still Time")

Galway Kinnell on being human:

"angels shiver to know down here we mortals make love with our bones" (from "There Are Things I Tell to No One")

Galway Kinnell on the meaning of life:

"It is written in our hearts, the emptiness is all.
That is how we have learned, the embrace is all." (from "Goodbye")

Galway Kinnell on love/eros:

"...to need
the whole presence of the other
so badly that the two together
wrench their souls from the future
in which each mostly wanders alone" (from "Flying Home")

Galway Kinnell on transcendence:

"In the heart of a man
There sleeps a green worm
That has spun the heart about itself,
And that shall dream itself black wings
One day to break free into the beautiful black sky." (from "Middle of the Way")

Galway Kinnell on mourning the dead:

"It is true
That only flesh dies, and spirit flowers without stop
For men, cows, dung, for all dead things; and it is good, yes--

"But an incarnation is in particular flesh
And the dust that is swirled into a shape
And crumbles and is swirled again had but one shape
That was this man. When he is dead the grass
Heals what he suffered, but he remains dead,
And the few who loved him know this until they die." (from "Freedom, New Hampshire," Kinnell's elegy for his brother)

[Rob the Obscure · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kinnell is a great poet; I don't see much room for serious doubt in this. He's not for everyone. He's not always for me. There are times when I am stunned, and there are times when I yawn. Then, there are times when I yawn, and then read the poem again 3 weeks later and am stunned.

That's the way it is with poetry, at least for me.

It's always risky to start playing with the language and trying to do something different. It's much safer just to keep to the rules and play it straight-ahead. I'm glad Kinnell goes out on a limb fairly often. Most of the times it is brilliantly successful. Some of the time I feel like I am looking at a poem that tries too hard, and is too concerned with itself.

But that's not all that critical, really. Basically, Kinnell usually makes us think, and sometimes makes us catch our breath. Those times, for me, are worth the wade.

[Nikita Gill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ah, the magic of Galway Kinnell. Some of his poems just know my soul better than I ever could. A thoroughly enjoyable and beautiful book.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This selection by Galway Kinnell won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1983. These poems are a subset of his Collected Poems which I recently read.

These are essentially his middle age poems which resonate the most with me. There are quite a few nature and wilderness poems in this collection - which I liked.

4 stars

[Gregory Duke · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

I'm surprised that I ended up preferring Kinnell in his early stages, with all his rigid rhymes and recurring clunks in tow, rather than his 70s output, which most readers seem to linger on. I seem to not like when Whitman becomes a clear influence after his first two books, and suddenly you have the Whitmanesque long lines and the rhyme has been done away with and the grandiosity enters intimate poems regarding nature and family life. These appear to be ideas I'd enjoy, but too many of these poems ring a bit hollow, like Kinnell grasps Whitman's ferocity and profound love of life, man, and nature yet can only but gesture while Whitman dances. Unfair comparison probably, although true, since Kinnell becomes a bit of a bore to sit with for too long.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

I often measure how much I enjoy a book of poetry by reviewing the number of post-it flags fluttering from the edge of the book. That wouldn't work with "Selected Poems". I was enjoying the readings and the poetry but had only flagged two poems in the first 120 pages. Then I hit the last section, the last 25 pages, from "Mortal Acts, Mortal Words" and I flagged almost every poem! He was 53 when that book was released and his words, his ideas, were speaking more directly to me, his style similar to my own.

Well worth adding to your reading list.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This selections includes poems from What A Kingdom It Was , Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock , Body Rags , The Book of Nightmares , and Mortal Acts Mortal Words , along with Kinnell's first poems written between 1946 and 1954...

From First Poems 1946-1954...

1

The stars were wild that summer evening
As on the low lake shore stood you and I
And every time I caught your flashing eye
Or heard your voice discourse on anything
It seemed a star went burning down the sky.

I looked into your heart that dying summer
And found your silent woman's heart grown wild
Whereupon you turned to me and smiled
Saying you felt afraid but that you were
Weary of being mute and undefiled


2

I spoke to you that last winter morning
Watching the wind smoke snow across the ice
Told of how the beauty of your spirit, flesh,
And smile had made day break at night and spring
Burst beauty in the wasting winter's place.

You did not answer when I spoke, but stood
As if that wistful part of you, your sorrow,
Were blown about in fitful winds below;
Your eyes replied your worn heart wished it could
Again be white and silent as the snow.

- Two Seasons, pg. 3

From What A Kingdom It Was ...

When you came and you talked and you read with your
Private zest from the varicose marble
Of the podium, the lovers of literature
Paid you the tribute of their almost total
Inattention, although someone when you spoke of a pig
Did squirm, and it is only fair to report another gig-

gled. But you didn't even care. You seemed
Above remarking we were not your friends.
You hung around inside the rimmed
Circles of your heavy glasses and smiled and
So passed a lonely evening. In an hour
Of talking your honesty built you a tower.

When it was over and you sat down and the chair-
man got up and smiled and congratulated
You and shook your hand, I watched a professor
In neat bow tie and enormous tweeds, who patted
A faint praise of the sufficiently damned,
Drained spittle from his pipe, then scrammed.

- For William Carlos Williams, pg. 17

From Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock ...

1

I move my hand over
slopes, falls, lumps of sight,
Lashes barely able to be touched,
Lips that give way so easily
it's a shock to feel underneath them

The bones smile.

Muffled a little, barely cloaked,
Zygoma, maxillary, turbinate.

2

I put my hand
On the side of your face,
You lean your head a little
Into my hand--and so,
I know you're a dormouse
Taken up in winter sleep,
A lonely, stunned weight.

3

A cheekbone,
A curved piece of brow,
A pale eyelid
Float in the dark,
And now I make out
An eye, dark,
Wormed with far-off, unaccountable lights.

4

Hardly touching, I hold
What I can only think of
As some deepest of memories in my arms,
Not mine, but as if the life in me
Were slowly remembering what it is.

You lie here now in your physicalness,
This beautiful degree of reality.

5

And now the day, raft that breaks up, comes on.

I think of a few bones
Floating on a river at night,
The starlight blowing in a place on the water,
The river leaning like a wave towards the emptiness.

- Poem of Night, pg. 53-54

From Body Rags ...

1
In the evening
haze darkening on the hills,
purple of the eternal,
a last bird crosses over,
‘flop flop,’ adoring
only the instant.

2
Nine years ago,
in a plane that rumbled all night
above the Atlantic,
I could see, lit up
by lightning bolts jumping out of it,
a thunderhead formed like the face
of my brother, looking down
on blue,
lightning-flashed moments of the Atlantic.

3
He used to tell me,
“What good is the day?
On some hill of despair
the bonfire
you kindle can light the great sky—
though it’s true, of course, to make it burn
you have to throw yourself in ...”

4
Wind tears itself hollow
in the eaves of these ruins, ghost-flute
of snowdrifts
that build out there in the dark:
upside-down ravines
into which night sweeps
our cast wings, our ink-spattered feathers.

5
I listen.
I hear nothing. Only
the cow, the cow of such
hollowness, mooing
down the bones.

6
Is that a
rooster? He
thrashes in the snow
for a grain. Finds
it. Rips
it into
flames. Flaps. Crows.
Flames
bursting out of his brow.

7
How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren’t, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames?

- Another Night in the Ruins, pg. 67-68

From The Book of Nightmares ...

A black bear sits alone
in the twilight, nodding from side
to side, turning slowly around and around
on himself, scuffing the four-footed
circle into the earth. He sniffs the sweat
in the breeze, he understands
a creature, a death-creature,
watches from the fringe of the trees,
finally he understands
I am no longer here, he himself
from the fringe of the trees watches
a black bear
get up, eat a few flowers, trudge away,
all his fur glistening
in the rain.

And what glistening! Sancho Fergus,
my boychild, had such great shoulders,
when he was born his head
came out, the rest of him stuck. And he opened
his eyes: his head out there all alone
in the room, he squinted with pained,
barely unglued eyes at the ninth-month's
blood splashing beneath him
on the floor. And almost
smiled, I thought, almost forgave it all in advance.

When he came wholly forth
I took him up in my hands and bent
over and smelled
the black, glistening fur
of his head, as empty space
must have bent
over the newborn planet
and smelled the grasslands and the ferns.

- Lastness, 2, pg. 116-117

From Mortal Acts Mortal Words ...

He climbed to the top
of one of those million white pines
set out across the emptying pastures
of the fifties - some program to enrich the rich
and rebuke the forefathers
who cleared it all at once with ox and axe -
climbed to the top, probably to get out
of the shadow
not of those forefathers but of this father
and saw for the first time
down in its valley, Bruce Pond, giving off
its little steam in the afternoon,

pond where Clarence Akley came on Sunday mornings to cut down
the cedars around the shore, I'd sometimes hear the slow spondees
of his work, he's gone,
where Milton Norway came up behind me while I was fishing and
stood awhile before I knew he was there, he's the one who put the
cedar shingles on the house, some have curled or split, a few have
blown off, he's gone,
where Gus Newland logged in the cold snap of '58, the only man will-
ing to go into those woods that never got warmer than ten below,
he's gone,
pond where two wards of hte state wandered on Halloween, the Na-
tional Guard searched for them in November, in vain, the next fall a
hunter found their skeletons huddled together, in vain, they're
gone,
pond where an old fisherman in a rowboat sits, drowning hooked
worms, when he goes he's replaced and is never gone,

and when Fergus
saw the pond for the first time
in the clear evening, saw its oldness down there
in its old place in the valley, he became heavier suddenly
in his bones
the way fledglings do just before they fly,
and the soft pine cracked.

I would not have heard his cry
if my electric saw had been working,
its carbide teeth speeding through the bland spruce of our time, or
burning
black arcs into some scavenged hemlock plank,
like dark circles under eyes
when the brain thinks too close to the skin,
but I was sawing by hand and I heard that cry
as though he were attacked; we ran out,
when we bent over him he said, "Galway, Inés, I saw a pond!"
His face went gray, his eyes fluttered close a frightening
moment.

Yes - a pond
that lets off its mist
on clear afternoons of August, in that valley
to which many have come, for their reasons,
from which many have gone, a few for their reasons, most not,
where even now and old fisherman only the pinetops can see
sits in the dry gray wood of his rowboat, waiting for pickerel.

- Fergus Falling, pg. 123-124

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whitmanesque, yep, though like if Walt had been infected with a strain of Southern Gothic. "The nagleria eating the convolutions from the black pulp of thought", yech.

Brothers and sisters;
lovers and children;
great mothers and grand fathers
whose love-times have been cut
already into stone; great
grand foetuses spelling
the past again into the flesh's waters:
can you bless - or not curse -
whatever struggles to stay alive
on this planet of struggles?
The nagleria eating the convolutions
from the black pulp of thought,
or the spirochete rotting down
the last temples of Eros, the last god?
- from There Are Things I Tell to No One

[Regine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant.

[Berslon Pank · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.

Copyright © 1980 by Galway Kinnell. From Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (Mariner Books, 1980). Used with permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

[Jesse Hilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I mean, it was good. A little loose at times. There were some profound lines that I will go back and try to recover. I still think an experience that I will never forget is reading The Book of Nightmares, which this selects four poems from. It’s interesting to read this and then look at poets like Lowell or Merrill who were incredibly polished and somewhat more formal. Kinnell’s poetry is perhaps (I want to say) more Whitmanesque or Beat-influenced. That doesn’t make it bad or good, just different. Sometimes you need that loose extemporaneous quality to approach the ineffable. So this was good, lots of nature and love and death. But I would maybe start with The Book of Nightmares and then expand to this.

[J. Alfred · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you have fond memories of childhood, or if you are a parent, or if you love another person on this perishing Earth, you should know the poem "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps." That's Kinnell's anthology piece, and it deserves the honor.
But unlike some other poets, his other stuff is very worth reading as well. They're powerful and mysterious, often in dialogue with older poems, and rush in like a collapsing mineshaft with gushes of fulfillment toward all the meanings they've been holding in tension at the end.

Nobody likes to die
But an old man
Can know
A kind of gratefulness
Toward time that kills him,
Everything he loved was made of it.

[Kasandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an astonishing collection. Took me a long time to get through due to sheer enjoyment, re-reading, and pondering. Though Kinnell's apparent subjects often start as animals in their natural habitats, the depth and breadth of his work takes us above the globe as a whole and deeply into ourselves, covering all the ground between, both visible and not. Powerful and moving.

[Steven Godin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overhead the skull-hill rises
Crossed on the top by the stunted apple,
Infinitely beyond it, older than love or guilt,
Lie the stars ready to jump and sprinkle out of space.

Every night under those thousand lights
An owl dies, or a snake sloughs its skin,
A man in a dark pasture
Feels a homesickness he does not understand.

[Margaret Gray · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite collection, tho I know there’s more GoodKinnell out there which didn’t make the cut : I liked the excerpts from “The Book of Nightmares” and a few poems aside but largely could not sympathize with the curation

[Michelle (Fluttering Butterflies) · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's beauty here even if I don't always understand it.

[Kate]

Do yourself a favor - read this and read it slow!

[Dave Christian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really a 4.5 but I'll round up. This was a very pleasant set of poems and they did what all great literature does, they put you in a specific time and place.

[Aeri · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my favorite poem in the collection. It was one of my favorites even before I had a child of my own.

After Making Love We Hear Footsteps

For I can snore like a bullhorn
Or play loud music
or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman
and Fergus will only sink deeper
into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash,
but let there be that heavy breathing
or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house
and he will wrench himself awake
and make for it on the run—as now, we lie together,
after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies,
familiar touch of the long-married,
and he appears—in his baseball pajamas, it happens,
the neck opening so small
he has to screw them on, which one day may make him wonder
about the mental capacity of baseball players—
and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep,
his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child.
In the half darkness we look at each other
and smile
and touch arms across his little, startlingly muscled body—
this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,
sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,
this blessing love gives again into our arms.~

[Belinda Rule · Rating 4 out of 5]

Partial completion review of 11 March 2013:

Part of the reason I came back to goodreads was the idea that I would make brief notes on what I was reading and what the best bits of it were, and these would be preserved to be searchable later. But this is the kind of book that confounds me by being too consistently good. Every poem is quotable. So far the narrating persona tends to be a down-at-heel woodsman-type striding around heroically communing with the seedpods on the wind in a semi-rural setting, which could easily alienate the likes of me, but it's so good I don't care.

If I have a favourite poem so far it's the one where Death is on the porch in a country house, being managed by some of social courtesy that is about to lose its efficacy (don't have book with me to find title). Which goes to the ongoing pattern of my liking my poems plotty.

I came unstuck reading "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World". So many excellent lines and vivid details, but it just goes on and on, and it's impossible to keep them all in consciousness to figure out what the collective point is. Someone is pouring a sack of wondrous multi-coloured turnips onto my head; each individual turnip is miraculous, but ow, dude, stop it.

[Cherie]

I love this poem by Kinnel--I think of it everytime I pick black berries at the Hoeger house. I'd like to read more of his poetry.

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry -- eating in late September.

[Sherry · Rating 2 out of 5]

First of all let me say I am having trouble with goodreads star rating system. I keep thinking 3 stars should be "it was okay" cause it is in the middle. Two stars, to me, means it wasn't liked, one star - hated. But I am trying to use goodreads ratings. So since this poetry book was okay - it gets 2 stars. grr.

Some of Kinnell's poems were truly amazing and some were pretty mundane - I actually began skipping. There is an occasional f-word (2 in whole book?) and some rare inappropriately crude language. So I don't necessarily recommend it. Maybe I will just put some of my favorite poems in here somewhere.

[Brad · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had fortunate opportunity to see Galway Kinnell read while I was an undergrad at Pitt, probably around 99 or 00. I didn't know a lot about poetry then and had likely never heard of or barely heard of him at that point in time. He was SPECTACULAR. Since then I've always recalled him and his poetry fondly but never read more than a poem of his here or there. So now I embark to read this book, I'm quite excited...



Finished the book: Was great. The reading was better but then I'm a bit of a sucker for readings....

Recommend this to anyone who enjoys reading poetry.

[Derek Emerson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read this many times and just went through (my signed copy!) over the last couple of weeks. Kinnell is my favorite contemporary poet and well worth reading. "The Bear" is a poem to read over and over.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though I liked only handful of poems on this book (to be a tad more specific, I could count the ones I dug into on one hand), they were quite moving and awesome, so the guy gets three stars just for those. I do wish I had liked more, but I just wasn't digging the earliest work. Sorry, Gally.

[Karianne · Rating 5 out of 5]

my favorite poet of all time. Amazing.

[Carl Stevens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Novelists need to know poetry.

[Kirsten]

Clearly great and yet not quite for me. Another day, another mood...

[Gary McDowell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like early Kinnell.