Galway Kinnell's career gives the impression of continuity despite his transformations of style and tone, perhaps because he has held fast to a certain idea of the possibilities of poetry. Throughout his career he has minded his matter first, in the faith that feeling sincerely will produce words adequate to experience, and has seemed pretty much content to cast his material in the received style of the day. Kinnell addresses the great and eternal themes in a contemporary idiom, convinced, it seems, that familiar emotions need only be rephrased with passion to be made new.

The poems in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words partake of the autumnal mellowness that now threatens to become the standard for the poets of Kinnell's generation as they enter the "late period." These new poems are as muted and personal as much of his previous work was hyperbolic and overscaled. That their burden is lighter does not mean, sadly, that Kinnell has succeeded any better at carrying it. He seems, as always, to arrive at resolutions he ultimately falls short of earning. Kinnell continually announces the familiar in the rhetoric of discovery; there is much of the inexplicable oddity of birth and death, and other such topics, in these poems…. (pp. 298-99)

Kinnell hopes, by taking on the great, intractable facts of love and loss, to achieve the kind of embattled radiance associated with the line of grim realists exemplified by Robert Frost. Yet the ruthless skepticism that such a stance demands is not among the weapons that Kinnell brings to the struggle; too often he resorts to rhetoric as a substitute for imaginative energy. The result might be likened to a fixed fight; no matter how good the show, and much of Kinnell is not without a certain power, the outcome rings hollow in the end. (p. 299)