[Some] 10 years ago, I witnessed a poetry reading so charged with high emotion and bardic intensity it left me both excited and exhausted…. [Galway Kinnell], scarcely looking down at the page, had chanted his way through the whole of "The Book of Nightmares," his book-length Rilkean sequence that remains one of the most ambitious works in contemporary poetry. This book, which exemplified Mr. Kinnell's belief that it is "the dream of every poem to be a myth," used material from his own life, such as the birth of his children, in ways that transcended autobiography and seemed to confront directly the rhythms of existence from birth to death. Especially as read aloud in one fell swoop, the poem gave powerful expression to the hopes and fears of a parent, husband and lover adrift in his own sense of mortality.

Later I came to feel that this remarkable book was less successful on the page than it had been in that momentous performance. But even in its special oral impact it could be seen as a culmination of the poetic revolution of the 1960's: the shift from formal poetry, with rhyme and regular meter, to a freer, more prosaic verse that follows the contours of the speaking voice; the turn from wit and irony to a more naked emotional urgency; the pursuit of sublimity through heightened language, memory and meditation; and a projection into nature. Even the book's profound anguish and sense of fatality placed it in the high Romantic vein that the poetry of the 60's had boldly revived.

Literary revolutions can prove just as transient or tyrannical as political ones. Once established, new styles can become routinized, timid and vulnerable to the mockery of the next avantgarde. The poets who gave up conventional form for the existential vagaries of inspiration found that even the language of passion, the alphabet of the sublime, could be mechanically simulated, or could fall imperceptibly into self-imitation. The literary landscape of the 70's is littered with the remains of poets who tried to wing it on affect or sincerity alone; by and large they produced shapeless poems that totter from experience to experience, written either in oracular bombast or a flat, ungainly language innocent of wit, imagery, rhythm and ideas.

The extremity of the new poetry, the reckless, even suicidal intensity of living and feeling it sometimes demanded of its creators, seemed by the early 70's to have induced a crisis in Galway Kinnell's career. The very achievement of "The Book of Nightmares" (1971) put a period to the kind of poetry it represented….

It was nine years before Galway Kinnell's next book of new poems, "Mortal Acts, Mortal Words," appeared. Here Mr. Kinnell managed to lower the volume without retreating to formalism or triviality. Though the book shows his continuing preoccupation with death, especially in poems about his late mother and long-dead brother, much of its wry humor, anecdotal directness and quiet simplicity reminded one more of Robert Frost (one of Mr. Kinnell's early models) than of the intensity of "The Book of Nightmares." He had concluded the earlier book with a stunning evocation of his son's birth, which led him to imagine his own death. In these later poems we glimpse the same boy, Fergus, discovering a pond, going on a fishing trip or trundling in on his parents after they have made love. The unassuming charm of this book caused it to be undervalued, even ignored, by many critics, especially by academic critics who had never really accepted the great shift in contemporary poetry. Yet, to my mind, it was Mr. Kinnell's best book, a collection that proved that at least one poet in the Whitman-Williams mode of the 60's had survived not only intact but triumphant.

The same impression emerges from ["Selected Poems," a] rich new volume of poems selected from every phase of Galway Kinnell's career, including four early poems in the stiff, formal mode of the postwar period and then 25 to 30 pages from each of five major volumes published between 1960 and 1980. The book includes his famous shamanistic set pieces "The Bear" and "The Porcupine" (from "Body Rags," 1968), which epitomize the intensely primitivistic nature poetry he wrote during the 1960's. It also contains about half of "The Book of Nightmares" and 14 of the 32 poems of "Mortal Acts, Mortal Words" (leaving out some of my favorites). On grounds of quality alone, a selection more weighted to the later poems would have been preferable; the inclusion of the earliest poems, with their hollow echoes of Yeats, is especially questionable. By printing immature poems to which he remains attached, Mr. Kinnell seems determined to show us how far from precocious he was and how much he suffered under the prevailing forms and conventions, which did little to inspire him.

Galway Kinnell's breakthrough came in the late 50's with a long poem called "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World," where he turned away from literary imitation, religious themes and fictional situations to record instead the sights and sounds of his own neighborhood, along Avenue C on the Lower East Side. The formless, documentary quality of this 15-page poetic album makes it only intermittently effective. Moments of forced sublimity add only a slight gloss to the pedestrian material. "The Avenue" is less a poem than a vast poetic notebook that enabled Mr. Kinnell—by a discipline of attention to the world around him—to slough off the artificialities and tired literary devices of the old style. (p. 12)

A more authentic Kinnell voice can be heard in two striking poems from his first two books, "Freedom, New Hampshire," an elegy for his dead brother, and "Spindrift," another young-man's poem about death…. [With] many shifts of emphasis, [death] has remained Galway Kinnell's principal theme for more than two decades. In 1971 he told an interviewer that, as he saw it, "death has two aspects—the extinction, which we fear, and the flowing away into the universe, which we desire." (pp. 12, 33)

The style of "Spindrift" also foreshadows the later Kinnell…. [His] poetry gets better as the lines get shorter: The literary mannerisms diminish, the diction loses its stiffness, and the poems take on a kind of stripped-down purity. Even the choppy look of the poem on the page reflects Galway Kinnell's fascination with the moment, the quantum of time that nevertheless implies all that is past, passing or to come. His theme is not death as a discrete event but death as the indwelling terminus that conditions our being from birth onward….

There is a shocking line in "The Book of Nightmares" in which Mr. Kinnell imagines lovers who "whisper to the presence beside them in the dark, O corpse-to-be …" In "Selected Poems" … the same lovers "whisper to the one beside them in the dark, O you-who-will-no-longer-be …" Both versions epitomize Galway Kinnell's eerie second sight, his insistence on peering at the bones behind the face—death beneath the mask of life, yet also some kind of ecstatic survival beyond the mask of death…. This Tiresias-like burden of vision, with its curse of prophetic in-sight, leads to what is strongest in the language of the mature Kinnell: a telescopic foreshortening of time into a single descriptive flash….

Some of the most stunning poems in "Mortal Acts, Mortal Words," such as "The Rainbow" and "The Apple" (both curiously excluded from this selection), are written in a style so foreshortened yet so chillingly percipient that they have the effect of puzzles or riddles. In "The Rainbow" … he telescopes birth, copulation and death into a single "misery-arc" that is completed only when "the carcass expels / defeated desire in one final curve / of groaning breath." On the other hand, "The Apple," which begins with Adam and Eve "poisoning themselves / into the joy / that has to watch itself go away," ends triumphantly with the bodies of dead lovers subsumed in the cycle of nature, yet also surmounting nature, transfigured….

"Selected Poems" is more than a good introduction to Galway Kinnell's work; it is a full-scale dossier for those who consider him, at 55, one of the true master poets of his generation and a writer whose career exemplifies some of what is best in contemporary poetry. He has not been seduced by modernist obfuscation, technical cleverness or earnest, thin-lipped confessional self-display. There are few others writing today in whose work we feel so strongly the full human presence. His language tantalizes us with a foretaste of meaning, an underlying emotional logic that recalls Whitman's "I am the man, I suffer'd, I was there." Like all good poetry, his finest poems attract and mesmerize us before we really understand them. (p. 33)