In a 1975 interview with The Colorado State Review, Galway Kinnell signalled the turn of his subjects to private or domestic event when he said: “My circumstances are such that I live most of my life rather busily in the midst of the daily and ordinary … whatever my poetry will be, from now on it will no doubt come out of this involvement in the ordinary.” A little bald; more than a little uncompromising in its avoidance of anything that could smack of a hankering after the sublime, or the titanic. Yet from within new subjects, the best of Kinnell's poems remain alert to “The moment / in the late night,” as in “The Poem” （1968）, when:

… objects
on the page grow suddenly
heavy, hugged
by a rush of strange gravity.

Language, in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words （1980）, is still the negotiation between flesh and spirit, making up the tracks that spirit lays down in the flesh of the word. Or, looks for that curious double moment when language flashes out to the quick of things, only to show in another and reciprocal pulsation how things themselves exist as a language. Here are lines from “Blackberry Eating”:

… 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.

Within the objects of Kinnell's language, there is an insistence on the ordinary object as the right carrier for meaning; as if more exalted objects could only blur or distort the precise fitting, the exact adjustment of language to reality. It is a language so understated that it seems proof against unintentional ironies, a speech fully armored by republican modesty for any necessary raids on the heavenly palace. A milk bottle, for instance, bearing a resemblance to the jar in Tennessee, works up to transcedence from just this deliberately prosy beginning:

… It's funny,
I imagine I can actually remember one certain
quart of milk which has just finished clinking
against three of its brethren
in the milkman's great hand and stands,
freeing itself from itself, on the rotting
doorstep in Pawtucket circa 1932,
by one in whom time hasn't completely
woven all its tangles, and not ever set down …
The old bottle will shatter no one knows when
in the decay of its music, the sea eagle
will cry itself back down into the sea
the sea's creatures transfigure over and over.
Look. Everything has changed.
Ahead of us the meantime is overflowing.
Around us its own almost-invisibility
streams and sparkles over everything.

Whatever the language is doing, it still admits the higher continuities. Ordinariness does not signal a rejection of significant subject, but gives notice instead of Kinnell's intention to broaden the space of subject where that significance is to be found. In the diction of this poetical discourse, “ordinary” means universal, means egalitarian.

But the ordinary also contains the time-bound, and from within it, Kinnell advances his central preoccupation: the conflict between eternity and human death. Broadly shaping all the new poems towards the elegiac, he takes these lines from Petrarch as his epigraph: “moral beauty, acts, and words have put all their burden on my soul.” In “There Are Things I Tell To No One” （a distressingly coy title for one of the more ambitious poems in the book）, he says:

I say “God”; I believe,
rather, in a music of grace
that we hear, sometimes, playing to us
from the other side of happiness.
When we hear it, it flows
through our bodies, it lets us live
these days lighted by their vanity
worshipping—as the other animals do,
who live and die in the spirit
of the end—that backward-spreading
brightness.

The new book's task is to understand that “backward-spreading brightness,” and to balance the longing heavenward against the down-pulling anchor of earth's subjects, and to be determined to pay earth its measure of honor.

In 1972, in his essay “The Poetics Of The Physical World,” these intentions were phrased:

The subject of the poem is the thing which dies. … Poetry is the wasted breath. This is why it needs the imperfect music of the human voice, this is why its words have no higher aim than to press themselves to us, to cling to the creatures and things we know and love, to be the ragged garments.

It is through something radiant in our lives that we have been able to dream of paradise, that we have been able to invent the realm of eternity. But there is another kind of glory in our lives which derives precisely from our inability to enter that paradise or to experience eternity. That we last only for a time, that everyone around us lasts only for a time, that we know this, radiates a thrilling, tragic light on all our loves, all our relationships, even on those moments when the world, through its poetry, becomes almost capable of spurning time and death.

As that “thrilling, tragic light” spreads over the poems that deal directly with the death of various people important to the poet—brother, mother, and indirectly, the father—how do the concessions made to poetry's limited reach eventually affect the style of Kinnell's tenderness to earthborn subjects? Given the modest possibilities enumerated here, the invention but not the occupation of heaven, poetry's “wasted breath,” how will the poet keep expressive faith in his bleaknesses; or will the dark mortalities have their edges bleached by sentimental compromise? If we take seriously Stevens’ premise that death is the mother of beauty, an analogous premise shaped a little flatfootedly by Kinnell into “another kind of glory in our lives”—then any poetics becomes at best a poetics of tragedy; but in dilution, a poetry of cloying pathos.

If we follow Kinnell in the things he tells to no one, God is a distant concept to be set off with inverted commas. The only knowable part of “God” is the “music of grace that we hear”—or, all that is knowable of grace is the music or poetry of life. Yet in this prose, frequently at variance with the speech of his poems, Kinnell limits poetry's capacity to fuse connections between life and eternity: poetry is only “almost capable” of beating back time and death. Kinnell is not consistently certain where, or if, the poetic act should be divinized. In this essay, a doubt about the transfigurative powers of language eventually registers in the poetry as the lesser force of nostalgia; a conceptual scheme of reality in which language is never more than the etiolations of print. In Kinnell's secularized humanism, uncertainty cuts edge away from the blade. Skepticism becomes a blurring diffidence where poetry denuded of religious authority, of security within Blake's “Human Form Divine,” cannot sustain or accept the merely human as a style of holiness without gods. Suspended homelessly between invention and experience, between speaking and being, Kinnell's poets drop their prophetic mantles. Within this space, Yeats’ searing lines from “The Tower” can only survive in very troubled fashion:

Death and life were not
Till man made up the whole
Made lock, stock and barrel
Out of his bitter soul.

Yeats' lines represent a clear conviction about the uses of art no longer as accessible, perhaps, to a late 20th century poet as to one cresting in the high phases of Romanticism or Modernism. An inheritor of “l'univers concentrationnaire,” and wary of anything leading to a religion of art, Kinnell does not toss us bon-mots in the style of Pound: “Religion: another of the numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.” About “God” Kinnell isn't sure; about poetry, its fitful illumination flows from what becomes “in the bedraggled poem of the modern … the images, those lowly touchers of physical reality, which remain shining.” Or, in the nominalist tradition, poetic images flow and shine in the apparent power of thing over word.

Given this perspective on the bedraggled language of the modern, to what degree can Kinnell's prose be said to rule, or over-rule the convictions of his poetry? It is instructive to begin by comparing a strong elegy for a brother; “Freedom, New Hampshire,” from 1960's What A Kingdom It Was, with family elegies from the current book. The early poem is quite explicit in its refusal to have its grief mitigated by belief in the comforts of the resurrection:

When a man dies he dies trying to say without slurring
The abruptly decaying sounds. 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.

Similarly, the theme of resurrection, or incarnate flesh as immortal spirit, is passed upon ironically in “The Supper After The Last,” again from the early book, where Kinnell has Christ speak this doctrine:

From the hot shine where he sits his whispering drifts:
You struggle from flesh into wings; the change exists.
But the wings that live gripping the contours of the dirt
Are all at once nothing, flesh and light lifted away.
You are the flesh; I am the resurrection, because I am the light.
I cut to your measure the creeping piece of darkness
That haunts you in the dirt. Step into light—
I make you over. I breed the shape of your grave in the dirt.

In both of these poems, the energy gained is the energy of their unbelief. Earth is read uncompromisingly as the site that confers meaning. Heavenly transfiguration is not our dominion because our turf remains turf.

“The Sadness Of Brothers” picks up the death of a brother again, but this time, twenty-one years later, loss is differently approached:

He comes to me like a mouth
speaking from under several inches of water.
I can no longer understand what he is saying.
He has become one
who never belonged to us, someone
it is useless to think about or remember.

The task of this elegy is to accept the absolute loss and suffering that the living experience. The dead brother is not lost merely to himself, or to some limited point in time, nor is imagination seen as an adequate substitute for real loss, because poetry is only an “almost capable.” From within the poem, there is clear acknowledgement that all moves at assuming the consciousness of others can only be partially or totally blocked: and then the poem enacts that blockage. When memory picks up an isolated picture of the dead brother, and tries to animate that body with what would be its living voice—projecting the long dead into the present moment—the real nature of loss is sustained. The speaker of section 4, playing at supposing his brother alive, and training his eyes on that resurrected image, says:

I think he's going to ask
for beer for breakfast, sooner
or later he'll start making obnoxious
remarks about race or sex
and criticize our loose ways
of raising children, while his eyes
grow more slick, his puritan heart more pure

Then dismisses that imagining: “But no, that's fear's reading.” And returns his brother to the mute and unknowable dead. What is dead is dead, not only to itself, but more crucially, and more persuasively this time, to us. We long for the company of those who are dead, but fruitlessly:

…—if it's true
of love, only what
the flesh can bear surrenders to time.

Both the earlier and later elegy offer a richness of life gathered in for observation, and a steady clearsightedness. But the second elegy, unlike the first, highlights much more complex personal and familial relationships over a longer arc of time. The earlier elegy, freshly within the experience, shaped its retrospective pastoral icon from childhood material, and interwove an account of its grief with farm imagery and animal life. Both are lovely poems; but the one less fierce, and written in middle age, draws closer to people, farther from nature, while it continues the earlier poem's stoic resignation to the rule of severance over our lives and language.

But in the elegies for the poet's mother, the subject tests other relations and perceptions, with strained results. These elegies and the poems that deal with children and friends prefer conventional bromides, or conventional evasions and discretions. Nearing the conclusion of “The Last Hiding Places Of Snow,” a patchy, if intermittently interesting poem, Kinnell shifts from his earlier view of the flesh as perishable, declaring the mother “beloved dross promising heaven,” and describes her ultimate transmutation from dead woman to eternal presence:

Every so often, when I look
at the dark sky, I know she remains
among the old endless blue lightedness
of stars; or finding myself out in a field
in November, when a strange
starry perhaps the first snowfall blows
down across the darkening air, lightly,
I know she is there, where snow
falls flakes down fragile softly
falling until I can't see the world
any longer, only its stilled shapes.

This soft falling skitters uncomfortably close to bathos, and matches other sections in “Fisherman” and “Two Set Out On Their Journey” where there are similar forced marches heavenward. More convinced by his religious skepticism than by his half-hearted religious faith, I would rather wait for the Kinnell who ends the poem on the human side of the grave as “the memory / her old body slowly executes into the earth.” With the marvelous turn on execute, the poem conforms to its darker finalities, and briefly, the language is once again invested.

But invested in a way that underlines the whole problem of the new book. While faith in the existence of a language, of existence itself as code is named, nevertheless the constraints that Kinnell has voiced earlier in prose eventually close in on poetry, and shut down faith in language just as he gives himself no other ground to stand on as his junction between flesh and all forms of spirit. The hop from “lowly touchers of physical reality” to “images” is all we have left as passage over the gap between ideas and things. The only way that the nominalist doctrine that all American poets have inherited—“No ideas but in things”—can be subverted is to take it seriously enough; to submit to its inherent realism and to believe that being and saying are one and the same. To see that blackberries are an order of language; and that word is a form of blackberry.

When Kinnell refuses to walk on that water, to rest on the constitutive powers of language, the whole game finishes. What we get next, in this book—and so many others like it plumping the domestic, the filial, the ordinary and the private—is not the shaping, visionary imagination—but after-images on the retina, the secondary vision that sadness produces. What we get is tragedy's younger and flabbier brother nostalgia, that de-energized heir of late civilizations.

There are other problematic exclusions and refusals in “The Last Hiding Places Of Snow,” and most of these cluster around the treatment of women and children. To take the women first, “The Last Hiding Places Of Snow” steps uneasily around the identification of woman as earth-symbol; the mother-spirit issues from “a place in the woods” which is at first quite a scary place; then, while “mother love” is invoked, and perceived as protecting the speaker, gradually, other feelings emerge:

My mother did not want me to be born;
afterwards, all her life, she needed me to return.
When this more-than-love flowed toward me, it brought darkness;
she wanted me as burial earth wants—to heap itself gently upon
but also to annihilate—
and I knew, whenever I felt longings to go back,
that is what wanting to die is. That is why
dread lives in me,
dread which comes when what gives life beckons toward death,
dread which throws through me
waves
of utter strangeness, which wash the entire world empty.

In this stance, Kinnell is not Antaeus, deriving strength from a reaffirmation of the ground of earth which is his being. While the lines depend on a basic identification of woman as earth-mother, they also follow the traditional misogynist conflation of womb/tomb, where the chthonic female is not muse, but instead the fixedly mortal part: the dread mother who in giving life beckons toward death. Kinnell's mother is a blurred, and softened, but still recognizable form of Blake's Tirzah:

Thou Mother of my Mortal Part
With cruelty didst mould my Heart.
And with false self-deceiving tears,
Didst bind my Nostrils Eyes & Ears.
Didst close my Tongue in senseless clay
and me to Mortal Life betray:
The Death Of Jesus set me free.
Then what have I to do with thee?

In Kinnell's poem, while he has declined both conventional Christian terms, as well as Blake's idiosyncratic enactment of the dialectical struggle of heaven and earth, in its allegorized reading of gender, he still makes use of this significant convergence of symbols, womb/tomb, but finally neither denies nor develops its misogynist coloring. Kinnell's mother dread just sits there.

Finally, the mother is absorbed into the Empyrean, and her fearful parentage subsides into the poet's resolute acceptance of his own parenting as a way of transcending despair and discontinuity. Kinnell introduces, then backs away from the explicit gender alignment and its problems. Although in the poem he seems uneasy about his inability to be there at the last and say goodbye, the whole argument of gender relationship in parenting, and what it negatively represents, and negatively enforces, is slipstreamed, or bypassed, as the poet simply wishes to be blessed at his own deathbed by his children's presence. Refusing to respond to the dread that has broken loose, Kinnell dissolves the gender issue into a spongy prose whose firmest and most vivid moment is this image:

… memories these hands keep, of strolling down Bethune Street in spring, a little creature hanging from each arm, by a hand so small it can do no more than press its tiny thumb pathetically into the soft beneath my thumb …

But implicitly, in the context of the poem, Kinnell shows that the suicidal despair that the earth-religion of the devouring mother evokes can be turned aside, its energy blessedly reconverted into an unproblematic, non-smothering father love. The female womb, and earth's asphyxiating ownership, however, explicitly put in an appearance as the cause of death and failed transcendence, as they did in The Book Of Nightmares, where the womb/tomb of earth becomes a shroud for the newborn. In two books, now, foetal life, in agreement with Wordsworth's “Intimations Ode,” represents attachment to a primary great world of memory and being. Born, “memories rush out,” as the newborn

… sucks
air, screams
her first song—and turns rose,
the slow,
beating, featherless arms
already clutching at the emptiness.

As babies leave the kingdom of the infinite, and pass through the bone gates of the woman, they diminish, and enter mortality: still touched, if fadingly, with the greater life of the non-human, and trailing those clouds of glory.

Finally, the ground of the poem of family relationships muddies in the space between the transition from one eschatological belief to another. In Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, the belief that an individual human existence is a flower that blooms but once, hence its singular sweetness, tangles with the belief suggested in The Book Of Nightmares that life is part of a birth-death cycle wherein we die to be born, and in which death returns us to our higher life in eternity, where we are free of the circling of generations of mere matter. There is a strong pull in this view towards a gender-polarized description of human nature, where the good parts are assigned to longing for celestial transcendence （male） and the wicked parts to a quietist chthonic restriction （female）.

In Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, except for the passage on dread of the female, quoted from “The Last Hiding Places Of Snow,” Kinnell does not wholly retreat to an overtly sexist position. This is only brushed in lightly for flashed seconds. Instead, for Kinnell, and for Blake on occasion, the negative symbology of woman/nature can be shelved in favor of a happier postulate: that sexual union of male and female is the iridescent emblem of the ruling principle of love made indwelling and physically manifest, as sexual love transforms the impermanence of the flesh through time-eating ecstasy:

… the last cry in the throat
or only dreamed into it
by its thread too wasted to cry
will be but an ardent note
of gratefulness so intense
it disappears into that music
which carries our time on earth away
on the great catafalque
of spine marrowed with god's flesh,
thighs bruised by the blue flower,
pelvis that makes angels shiver to know down here we mortals make love
with our bones.

In terms more casual, but no less convinced, from “Flying Home”:

in the airport men's room, seeing
the middle-aged men my age
as they washed their hands after touching
their penises—when it might have been more in accord
with the lost order to wash first, then touch—

Only through mortal flesh is flesh made immortal, as human birth, fueled by holy sexual desire, cancels human death. If, in another poetics, language is finally too unreliable to be the conveyor of the eternal real, sex is not. And from this elevation of sexuality as death's death-blow, it also seems an easy transit to a usually phallocentric world, and to the elimination of woman as muse, or energy source, in literary terms. Not an enriching move: as Kinnell and so many other American male writers use their masculinity, often with crushing innocence, as an occluded representation of the human state. Self-consciousness about sexism has driven the more robust misogyny underground, but the old vision, still stubbornly retained in pieces, has not yet been replaced with one more generous or inclusive. For many, the choice simply becomes retreat to a human effigy with the genitals either conspicuously male, or blurred, or lopped.

A muse figure, except as a flickering possibility, does not exist for Kinnell. As we have seen earlier, deity as the origin of grace or song is equally remote. While earlier poems drew from his animals the most resonant cry longing for immortality, longing for the artifice of eternity, that cry originated in a male totem: a porcupine or a bear. Philip Slater, in The Glory Of Hera, traces the birth of Dionysos from the hiding-place of Zeus’ thigh as one of the classic feints of the male narcissist, as he attempts to expunge his dreaded mother as inheritance, and to deny his need for parental love: in this mythic replay of birth, the Greeks displaced women altogether. It is interesting to see that Kinnell similarly displaces women from the birth-role in “The Bear,” by claiming the male totem as his source of creative energy. In “The Bear,” Kinnell's speaker literally climbs into the carcass, to be re-born as poetic speech; more overtly later, but in an analogous displacement, in “The Last Hiding Places Of Snow,” the generative line dissolves from the problematic mothering into the speaker's fathering. （As usual, more is hunkering down in the American woodlot than first meets the eye.）

In The Book Of Nightmares, the source of transcending mortality through mortality begins to thrust forward in Kinnell's mythology of children, where the births of his daughter Maud and son Fergus provide the framework for the sequence opening and closing the book. Speaking inWalking Down The Stairs about The Book Of Nightmares, and after remarking that the book is “nothing but an effort to face death and live with death,” Kinnell goes on to describe the special connection that infants have to transcendence:

These little lumps of clinging flesh, and one's terrible, inexplicable closeness to them, make one feel very strongly the fragility of a person. In the company of babies, one is very close to the kingdom of death. And as children grow so quickly, as they change almost from day to day, it's hardly possible to put mortality out of mind for long.

Approximately eight years after saying this, Kinnell's concern with babies as emblem of the human link to death has altered, and broadened to stress generational and familial continuity. The focus on eternal co-presence is returned earthside; out Kinnell's way, however, parenting is mostly something that fathers do by themselves.

Up to The Book Of Nightmares and including all of the previous work, Kinnell's personae live comfortably within the American macho: boy, tramp, convict, logger, skier and hiker—these solitary speakers wander quite naturally and without any sense of excluded life. If in poems about parenting Kinnell later becomes the celebrant of domesticity, it is certainly not that he does so after having served a term as the poet of marriage. The adult female, abstractly celebrated as a featureless sexual partner, is only fleetingly invoked as part of Kinnell's cosmos. （An early exception to this is the vivid little poem dedicated to Denise Levertov, reading her poetry.） If in the new book we are slowly working up to a family romance, it is still a romance where most of the parts are played by men.

In the work of some poets, it would be easy to construct an argument defending this practice. As many worlds exist that can legitimately be characterized by the acute absence of either sex, it seems fruitless to demand equal time at all times. But Kinnell suggests a poetics yoking physical and imaginative creativity, and fusing poems and human generations within a single energy source. If mothers, wives and daughters are obliterated, except for equivocal traces, within this set-up, Kinnell invites the return of the repressed in significant lapses in the story; important gaps, and because of the gaps, distortions. You can't take on children, parents and the family without installing the ladies somewhere. From the recent book, the short poem “Saint Francis And The Sow,” moves to fill this absence, as the sow is lifted into the series of animal totems including porcupine and bear. In the poem, the speaker firmly tells the mama pig the old story of her beauty:

… Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing
beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

But Saint Francis may be casting out more than the poet bargains for, as this poem appears to transform mother dread, or a potentially fearsome and devil-ridden sow into a nurturant, if phallically lengthy, “perfect loveliness.”

Kinnell has elsewhere pleaded for a poetics that will be personally inclusive. In “Poetry, Personality and Death” he says:

If we take seriously Thoreau's dictum, “Be it life or death, we crave only reality,” if we are willing to face the worst in ourselves, we also have to accept the risks I have mentioned, that probing into one's own wretchedness one may just dig up more wretchedness. What justifies the risk is the hope that in the end the search may open and transfigure us.

What is most appealing in Kinnell's new book is not wretchedness, but a persona that exudes human warmth, a generous and caring soul. What creates the dilemma of sentimentality, though, is exactly what charm excludes: that core of faith in language's ability to reflect directly on the relation of men and women, in the minute particulars of what is to constitute, in Kinnell's phrase from The Book Of Nightmares, “tenderness to existence.” Clearly a tenderness that has to make its way through fears that are also conceivable by the poet, right in the midst of sexuality, in these terms:

Just as the supreme cry
of joy, the cry of orgasm, also has a ghastliness to it,
as though it touched forward
into the chaos where we break apart

Without a better map of that ghastliness, and its kindred cohesions and disintegrations, as they are played out in the man-woman relationship, and as they re-play earlier family roles, the book fits too comfortably into its tendernesses; without the risk-taking that this expanded subject might have provided, the book's larger ambition parks itself for a while, giving us more intermittent pleasure, but not the pleasure that readers of this copiously gifted poet might have expected. In response to “Poetry, Personality and Death,” Adrienne Rich said:

The problem for Kinnell, I believe （and if I single him out in this essay it is not because I think his blindness is greater but his potential for vision more）—the problem for Kinnell is the problem of the masculine writer—To become truly universal, he will have to confront the closed ego of man in its most private and political mode: his confused relationship to his own femininity, and his fear and guilt towards women.

These are subjects Kinnell touches gingerly at points; indeed, the closing poem of Mortal Acts, Mortal Words looks to be a partial engagement with Rich's program. “Flying Home,” however, instead of returning both poet and poetry to the full resonance of the home ground—the last two words of the book—manages bald platitude in place of the male-female engagement, as most of the charm of this poem is located elsewhere.

In The Book Of Nightmares, both daughter and son, Maud and Fergus, become emblems of continuity; but in the new book the son becomes the emblem of the on-going continuity of father generations. While it is true that people, even poets, have to live their lives as people, rather than as symbolic portents, nevertheless, the absence of one of the earlier symbolic people belonging to this story of lives becomes noticeable. What happened to the memorable girl-child detailed in “Little Sleep's Head Sprouting Hair In The Moonlight”:

In a restaurant once, everyone
quietly eating, you clambered up
on my lap: to all
the mouthfuls rising toward
all the mouths, at the top of your voice
you cried your one word caca! caca! caca!
and each spoonful
stopped, a moment, in midair, in its withering
steam.

Shame on Kinnell for forgetting this pungent little critic of transcendence, echoing as she does the earlier feelings of her father:

The great thing about Whitman is that he knew all of our being must be loved, if we are to love any of it. I have often thought there should be a book called Shit, telling us that what comes out of the body is no less a part of reality, no less sacred, than what goes into it; only a little less nourishing. It's a matter of its moment in the life cycle: food eaten is on the cross, at its moment of sacrifice, while food eliminated is at its moment of ascension.

（Kinnell, “The Poetics Of The Physical World”）

But while on the subject of problematic exclusions in Kinnell's American romanticism, and his failure to avoid entrapment in some of its aesthetic positions, I'd also like to point to successful adaptations and continuities, especially in the parts of Kinnell's work that overlap Thoreau. In the necessarily revisionist strategy of our late age, the best answer for difficulties that the tradition offers may well not be to sink the offending antecedent, as Kinnell tried to do with Thoreau in “The Last River,” or to bury him in your prose, but to keep a wary eye on him up front. In “The Last River,” Kinnell dismissed Thoreau and what Thoreau himself called the “excrementitious” truths of his gravel bank in a Spring thaw, and which Kinnell re-labeled the failure of “Seeking love …”; accusing Henry David of “failing to know I only loved / my purity.” Nonetheless, Kinnell has him come back to inhabit the fisher child of Mortal Acts, Mortal Words. In one of the most successful new poems, “Fergus Falling,” Kinnell outlines in fairly compact form what both the strengths and dilemmas are of accepting the full flowering of the isolato, to borrow another American writer's term for the revolutionary persona in question.

In this poem, written with a deceptively casual music, Kinnell begins:

He climbed to the top
of one of those million white pines
set out across emptying pastures
of the fifties—some program to enrich the rich
and rebuke the forefather
who cleared it all 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

After completing this magical climb out of the order of the generations, in full Oedipal revolt, the poem stalls the engine of ascent for a moment to look at Bruce Pond. In effective, rhythmically irregular strophes, Kinnell describes the pond. In service to a belief in the fusion of letter and literal within the real, and with the intent of tracing the same intersection between the real and the symbolic, Thoreau drew Walden Pond for us in fidelity to its deceptive ordinariness, and then told us:

A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.

Kinnell follows the same intention of reflecting in language the order of language within the order of nature:

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,

In banging home that refrain, “he's gone,” Kinnell puts us in the book's preoccupation, mortality, but here, the mortality of a serenely repeating human order, in a persuasive syntax of continuity:

pond where an old fisherman in a rowboat sits, drowning hookedworms,
when he's gone he's replaced and is never gone

And then we get to the moment of recognition preceding the fall which gives the poem its title:

when Fergus … 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 …

Fergus falls into his own mortality, anticipating what his adult body will do later. But the pond remains for the transfixed child an exchange of gazes with the eye of earth. The pond also remains an emblem in the tradition of Emerson and Thoreau as a fusion, or crossing-place of self and world, where through nature's mediation, both become known, even though in the ending, emphasis shifts from the optimism of having achieved knowledge, or spirit-food, to the more phlegmatic angling and waiting for it:

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 an old fisherman only the pinetops can see
sits in the dry gray wood of his rowboat, waiting for pickerel.

In this poem, which takes the child protagonist into the romantic struggle to know self through nature, Kinnell only briefly touches on the intersection of that task with the style of self-knowledge gained through contrasting one's knowledge of identity through family order. In this poem, the father generations are the muted backdrop. As he evades an open treatment of the family themes that have met with such partial success elsewhere, Kinnell in this poem converts avoidance into advantage: “Fergus Falling” comes into its own by freshly acknowledging an aspect of harmony which has more to do with our place in the non-human, physical world, and much less to do with our relations to each other.

In a similar mutation of Romantic convention, two other poems, “Daybreak” and “The Grey Heron,” direct the focus away from the relentless anthropomorphizing that too close an imitation of Thoreau might have engendered. In these poems, stripped of the pathetic fallacy, there is an impersonal pleasure as the work bespeaks an order of things which modestly contains, rather than prominently features Man. “The Grey Heron” notes the rhyme of heron form with “a three-foot lizard / an ill-fitting skin / and with linear mouth expressive of the even temper / of the mineral kingdom.” The poem then places the final line recognizing the principle of mutability in the mouth of a mutable speaker on equal terms with his bird brother. “Daybreak” is likewise interested in the flux and permeability of natural order:

On the tidal mud, just before sunset,
dozens of starfish
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.

This small, quiet poem contains the same echoing large-scale satisfactions as the famous passage about nightfishing in Walden, where that ardent angler sinks his line down in the mysterious element only to realize that he has hooked heaven in the deep sky-water of his local pond. If in the next book, Kinnell sustains the re-ordering intensity of these last spatial paradoxes, he may yet advance Thoreau out of the woods and into a family cabin, and in another arc of motion, get the homebound airplane of this book to complete the trajectory promised.