Galway Kinnell once said, according to Donald Hall, that he had no use for any poem upon which the poet did not bring to bear the weight of his entire life. The results of such a standard are there to see in Kinnell's earlier books—the unrelenting seriousness, the pressure always to be deeply significant. It is exhausting sometimes, and has made Kinnell a poet best ingested in small doses. [Mortal Acts, Mortal Words] is different; its relaxed tone is apparent from the start and results in a number of lighthearted poems, poems one feels Kinnell could not have written before. He is now capable, for example, of poems like "On the Tennis Court at Night," a kind of elegy for all the good times, times of friendship and youth…. [The last stanza] is both effective and affective, part of what may be the best tennis poem in existence. But where is that lumbering hermit, that hunter-poet, willing to eat blood-soaked bear turds in his quest for the ultimate poem?

He may appear briefly towards the end of the book, where Kinnell seems to give over much of this wonderful physical specificity in favor of a series of relatively abstract, relatively theoretical poems. Although much more ambitious than the earlier poems, these are also less successful—partly because their abstractness pales beside the earlier poems' love of physical detail, and partly because their complexity is at times confusing—as in … "Pont Neuf at Nightfall."… The general idea—perhaps—comes through, but the details, the images, are not at all well-handled. Ideas, in these later poems, dominate things in an unfortunate violation of the doctrine expressed at the end of "The Apple."

Elsewhere Kinnell's very relaxation gets him in trouble; a stanza like this—on his dead mother's love—leaves me gasping for breath:

     So lighted I have believed
     I could wander anywhere,
     among any foulnesses, any contagions,
     I could climb through the entire empty world
     and find my way back and learn again to be happy.

There is this kind of thing here, but mostly not; mostly this is a volume of wonders, of poems like "Kissing the Toad."… There is an endless pleasure in such poems. Mortal Acts, Mortal Words is a new departure for Galway Kinnell, on the whole a successful one. It is permeated by an expressed love for the created world—love for nature, love for family, love for woman. This is Kinnell's answer to set against the mortal winds that always are ready to blow across the face of this earth. (pp. 891-92)