Galway Kinnell is a poet of astonishing incarnations, he never seems to be where you last met him and he's always secure in his new adaptation. [The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World] brings together poems from his first three books, covering the years between 1946 and 1964, many of the earliest [having] been returned to their pre-revised form which, upon rediscovery, the author himself preferred…. By turn and with level facility, Kinnell is a poet of the landscape, a poet of soliloquy, a poet of the city's underside and a poet who speaks for thieves, pushcart vendors and lumberjacks with an unforced simulation of their vernacular. New England woods, the Oregon coast, Calcutta, T'ang Dynasty China, Wales and Manhattan's ghetto: his geography is global and it reveals, when paid close attention, a perennial dialogue of death and resurrection…. (p. 599)

Hard to believe, as we turn the pages in admiration, that the same poet wrote "The Wolves" or "Where the Track Vanishes" or "Koisimi Buddhist of Altitudes" or, above all, "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World" (I do think that title is a wounded snake), a masterwork of vocal effects, shared lamentation, unreserved closeups of ghetto characters who, after closing their junkshops and loading their pushcarts, withdraw into "chambers overhead" … and fluent panoramas that remind one of the swarming, funereal paragraphs of I. B. Singer. (p. 600)