It is 20 years now since Galway Kinnell published his first book of poems, "What a Kingdom It Was." The glory of that volume was a long poem, "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ Into the New World," an overtly Whitmanian celebration and lament that remains one of the major American visions of New York City. Rereading it alongside Mr. Kinnell's new book confirms the sense I remember experiencing two decades ago, that here was another phantasmagoria of the city worthy of its ancestry, in that line that goes from Poe's "The City in the Sea" through Whitman on to its culmination in Hart Crane's "The Bridge." Galway Kinnell had made a magnificent beginning, and held a remarkable promise.

Whether his subsequent work as yet has vindicated that promise is problematic, though there have been very good poems in all of his books, including his new "Mortal Acts, Mortal Words." His poetic virtues have remained constant enough, and have won him a deserved audience. Of his contemporaries, only the late James Wright and Philip Levine have been able to write with such emotional directness, without falling into mere pathos, the usual fate of American poets who speak straight forth out of the self. Mr. Kinnell is able to avoid the difficulties whose overcoming is necessary when we read John Ashbery, James Merrill and A. R. Ammons, among current poets, but whether his eloquent simplicities have the discipline of Mr. Levine's best poems is open to some question.

The poet and critic Richard Howard once characterized Galway Kinnell's poetry as being an Ordeal by Fire, which is to give him a generous accolade he may not have earned, or not fully as yet. The characterization points not only to Mr. Kinnell's most pervasive metaphor, the flame of Pentecost, but also to his largest poetic flaw, a certain over-ambition that makes of each separate poem too crucial an event…. Mr. Kinnell's gifts, whatever they will yet be, do not gracefully sustain such enormous tensions. Some of his best earlier poems, such as "The River That Is East" and "The Bear," had design and diction firm enough to outlast their own intensities, but most of the more recent verse does not….

But I grow a little uneasy at my own ingratitude as a reader, when confronted by a lyric meditation as beautiful and gentle as "Wait" in this new volume. It is difficult not to be grateful for a poem as generous, honest and open as "There Are Things I Tell to No One," or for a lyrical closure as precise as that in "The Gray Heron."…

Something also has to be said for Mr. Kinnell's descriptive powers, which are increasing to a Whitmanian amplitude. The last poem in the book, "Flying Home," will convey an authentic shock of recognition to anyone who has shared recently in that experience. But to sum up, this does seem to me the weakest volume so far by a poet who cannot be dismissed, because he seems destined still to accomplish the auguries of his grand beginnings.