In an interview in 1971, [Galway Kinnell] had this to say about The Book of Nightmares, the superb long poem published earlier that year:

I thought of that poem as one in which I could say everything that I knew or felt…. I didn't want to let that poem go. I felt I could spend the rest of my life writing it—revising and perfecting it…. Eventually I had to force myself to get rid of it, though I knew I would feel an unsettling emptiness for a long time afterward. I hope I feel as totally consumed again.

"Wait," in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, seems written out of that very complex of feelings. One might even hear overtones of Rilke, who meant so much to Kinnell when he was writing the Nightmares, in its closing lines:

  Only wait a little and listen:
  music of hair,
  music of pain,
  music of looms weaving all our loves again.
  Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
  most of all to hear
  the flute of your whole existence,
  rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

The connection made in the last lines characterizes this new book even as it did the preceding volume. While suffering and song are tied up for any poet, Kinnell more than most has made that relationship an explicit subject. At times, song remedies suffering, as in "The Still Time."… At other, more distinctive moments, sorrow and music seem one, as they do also in the fifth section of the last of the Nightmares, where so many of the elements in the poem come together: when "the violinist / puts the irreversible sorrow of his face / into the opened palm / of the wood, the music begins."… It is as though crying were singing. (pp. 123-24)

What then saves Kinnell's poetry—as something assuredly does—from being melodramatic and maudlin? For one thing, for all his talk about sorrow, he never makes it appear that his sorrow differs from anyone else's…. That recognition encourages a poetry that, however personal in its references, continually expands into larger statements…. His need to see his own feelings in a larger context can lead him into inflation and platitude, as I think it does in "Flying Home."… But usually his generalizations rise out of striking images and crystallize in aphorisms, as in "Wait."… (pp. 124-25)

Then, too, rather than trying "to intensify and perfect" his sorrow, Kinnell tries to understand its relationship to joy. For him as for Yeats the two seem interdependent: "It is written in our hearts, the emptiness is all. / That is how we have learned, the embrace is all." If true song involves crying, it also entails laughing, as it did even for Amos, the old hobo in "Memory of Wilmington."… Suffering, happiness, song: it sometimes seems that all of life might be summed up in a single utterance, as in "There Are Things I Tell to No One":

   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, so the death-groan
   sounding into us from another direction carries us back
   to our first world….

That cry or groan—they are really "one sound"—reverberates throughout this book, often in onomatopoetic forms, as Kinnell, who has sent us to the Oxford English Dictionary as often as any contemporary poet, resorts to the most primitive exclamations in order to get to the heart of the matter. (p. 125)

If Kinnell cannot cast out remorse altogether ("I know now there are regrets / we can never be rid of, / permanent remorse"), he still finds himself "blessing the misery" and able to imagine that "the last cry in the throat … will be but an ardent note / of gratefulness." This attitude differs slightly but significantly from that in the Nightmares. The earlier book attests to what he once observed in Whitman, "the double thought of death," the simultaneous fear of and desire for it. As Whitman grew older, Kinnell thinks, "he was able to transfigure both the fear and the desire into a willingness to die and an even purer wish to live," and something of the same change has taken place in his work.

He must find himself on easier terms with mortality partly because he finds it easier to see the universe as a whole. "Can it ever be true," he wonders in the Nightmares, "all bodies one body, one light / made of everyone's darkness together?" Now he can answer more certainly in the affirmative…. To put it perhaps too succinctly, to feel that the universe is a whole is to begin to transcend the self, and to go beyond the self is to mitigate the fear of death. (pp. 126-27)

This view of things has permitted some of the finest poems that Kinnell has ever written. In one way or another it has let him write, in addition to ["Wait" and "There Are Things I Tell No One"], "Fergus Falling" (a little tale of death and continuity that includes a catalogue in which the details link and contrast so nicely that somewhere Whitman himself nods and smiles), "On the Tennis Court at Night," and "The Apple." Just look at this last poem's final stanza if you think it unlikely that this book can equal the Nightmares. Or look even at "The Gray Heron," a short, modest poem built of nuances. Kinnell goes searching in the brush for a heron he has glimpsed but finds only "a three-foot-long lizard / in ill-fitting skin."… As surely as the observing poet has merged with the bird/lizard now changing before our eyes into a watching stone, Kinnell has changed into something else in this book. American literature is richer and stranger for the transformation. Grand as it is, The Book of Nightmares could only, after all, be written once. Kinnell was determined not to repeat himself but to go on, and he has gone on. It took him about nine years to write these poems, but if it had taken him thirty, none of the time could have been counted lost. Mortal Acts, Mortal Words might just give its title the lie. It is certainly one of the chief indications that all is well in American poetry. (pp. 127-28)