In the recently published Walking Down the Stairs, selections from interviews with Galway Kinnell …, one of the interviewers asks Kinnell: "That loneliness you say you wrote out of—do you think that young poets today are less rich because they lack that?" Kinnell replies, "I never thought of it as richness." One of the charming things about these interviews is the way Kinnell changes a question by butting his head through the interviewer's premises. This particular question meant "richness for poetry," of course, but Kinnell refuses to distinguish lonely poets from lonely people: no one is richer for being lonely.

Questions like this one are generated by the notion that poets are a special breed who welcome suffering, madness, and poverty for the sake of their poetry…. It is refreshing, then, to watch Galway Kinnell sidestep such notions. (p. 95)

This integration of poetry with life informs all of Kinnell's more interesting responses in Walking Down the Stairs. Sensitive to "either/or" thinking, he is quick to give "both … and" answers that are in the same inclusive spirit as his poetry…. His commitment to relation—between poetry and everything else, between the poet and everyone else—makes this collection of interviews crucial reading for anyone interested in the survival of healthy literature.

Just this probing for relations, for coherent wholeness, characterizes Kinnell's best poems, and Walking Down the Stairs should send his readers back to the poetry with enhanced understanding. It strikes me that Kinnell's is an utterly healthy poetry, with none of the suppression of self that characterizes Eliot or Stevens and none of the perfecting of psychic wounds that characterizes much contemporary poetry. It is healthy precisely because it confronts horrors—drunks dying of cirrhosis; war and destruction; the communal nightmare of a failing culture; the individual nightmare of the failure of love—along with all that is lovely and loving. These facets of the single gem, the human condition, are examined with a jeweler's sense not only of their beauty but also of their dimension…. Kinnell's gift is a cursed awareness of time—not just of individual mortality but of geological time that lends special poignance to even the most hostile of human encounters. Thus when he concludes The Book of Nightmares with the message to his son, "the wages of dying is love," the moment is more than individual, more than parental; it looks back at all the nightmares recorded in the book and transforms them.

Less satisfying than Kinnell's general remarks in the interviews are his interpretations of specific lines in the poetry. The best reading in the book is his interpretation of the famous conclusion to "How Many Nights." The crow calling "from a branch nothing cried from ever in my life" elicits either-or questions: is the crow benign or evil? welcome or awful? Kinnell sweeps them all together in his answer that "whether or not the crow's cry is beautiful mattered less to me than that this hitherto mute region comes into consciousness." That's a wonderful reading, far superior to his comments about lines in The Book of Nightmares. (pp. 95-6)

Kinnell's title, Walking Down the Stairs, is a confession of the interviews' fictional quality. He has tinkered with the actual conversations the way one does one's evening repartee after it's delivered—while walking down the stairs, that is. In fact, the difference between these and the original interviews is not as great as the title would suggest …, and is worth noting only because the unedited versions confirm what one suspects from Walking: the public man—good-natured, eager to help the interviewer, optimistic—has few of the acerbic, ironic, or horror-stricken moments that possess the hugely foundering, hugely loving, hugely possessed speakers of Kinnell's poetry. If there is a fiction here, it is less that the poet has revised his conversations than that he himself has been revised by the occasion, the circumstance of being interviewed. The occasion creates a "public" figure whose views of the poetry cannot be those of the "private" man who created it.

What the interviews obscure by eliciting this polite public figure is Kinnell's essentially sexual vision. Though he says much the same thing in the interviews—that what we fear from death is extinction, what we welcome is absorption—the sexual basis of this idea is presented more explicitly in his two essays, "Poetry, Personality, and Death" and "The Poetics of the Physical World." These essays are useful for a glimpse of Kinnell seen neither in the privacy of creation nor in the publicity of exchange, for they show how Laurentian is Kinnell's desire for union with the "other." In "Poetry, Personality, and Death," for example, Kinnell analogizes: "As with poetry, so with love: it is necessary to go through the personality to reach beyond it." (p. 97)

For some readers, perhaps the most interesting remarks in these interviews will be those about the poets most important to Kinnell. Yeats, Whitman, and Rilke are the three: Yeats for the associative linking device that Kinnell uses so brilliantly in "The Porcupine," "The Hen-Flower," and other of his longer poems; Whitman for the inclusive, "through the personality to the universal humanity" vision; and Rilke, Rilke, Rilke, like some angel who haunts this earth-bound man. Much of Kinnell's poetry, especially that written after the birth of his children, is a meditation on Rilke's vision of the inseparability of life and death. The Book of Nightmares stands as a tribute to Rilke's Duino Elegies, particularly the ninth, which sparked the composition of Kinnell's book.

Kinnell's transformation of Rilke's vision into the terms of his own earthier temperament is recorded in his every comment about Rilke. Both poets accept mortality as the very condition for rejoicing; "the subject of the poem," Kinnell says in "The Poetics of the Physical World," "is the thing which dies." This echoes, as so much of Kinnell's work does, Rilke's ninth Elegy: "… The things that live on departure / are aware of your praising; transitory themselves, they count / on us to save them, us, the most transient of all." Kinnell's participation in the world of things and animals is, however, more visceral than Rilke's, less spiritual, less intellectual. For Rilke the poem is the means to the transformation of the world; for Kinnell it is a means to participation. (pp. 97-8)