The Past

by Galway Kinnell

Near fine. Trade paperback. A collection of poems, many rooted in his life in rural Vermont. 57 pp.

Genres: Poetry

57 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1985

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

[Luigi Sposato]

Amazing endings to these poems.

Kinnell has such a way with closing poems that it simultaneously makes you feel sad it ended but grateful for its picturesqueness in doing so.

[Darius Atefat-Peckham]

“I want to lie out / on my back under the thousand stars and think / my way up among them, through them / and a little distance past them, and attain / a moment of absolute ignorance, / if I can, if human mentality lets us. / I have always intended to live forever; / but not until now, to live now. The moment / I have done one or the other, I here swear, / no one will have to drag me, I’ll come / but never will I agree to burn my words.”

[j e rodriguez]

"Those nights now lie almost farther away than memory goes."

[Sherry]

There were some moving poems at the beginning, about his childhood and brother. (unfortunately a couple poems with language and vulgarity.)