[In the following essay, Kinnell's career is surveyed in light of the publication of Imperfect Thirst.]

In this last decade of an apocalyptic century, many of us begin to search for the voices who can lead us away from despair for humanity and toward hope for the next era. The publication of Galway Kinnell's latest book, Imperfect Thirst, provides an opportunity to review the career of a poet who may turn out to be one of those voices. Few writers have embraced the contemporary existential view of life with as much grace and affirmation as Kinnell. In his poetry, he has made the shift successfully from the theistic framework of our forebears to the secular one our culture has claimed as its own, a shift, for Kinnell, that does not leave behind the sacred but weaves it into the very air we breathe. He is a poet who has taken the material of the self, delivered into our laps mid-century like an uncertain fetus, and taught it that it can survive, even flourish, on the earthly elements of human love and the knowledge of death. This affirmation stands as his major achievement. But Kinnell's contribution to American poetry touches formal aspects as well as content. An already acknowledged master of free verse, he displays in this latest book an even greater ability to put into practice his own definition of poetry, "Saying in its own music what matters most."

Kinnell's has been a quiet career. Allied with none of the various schools of poetry which often monopolize the attention of critics, his work has only in the last several years begun to receive the serious critical consideration it deserves, despite the Pulitzer awarded his Selected Poems in 1983. Born in 1927, he came to maturity at the beginning of the postmodern movement away from the tigher forms and distanced, ironic voices which predominated in American poetry in the earlier decades of this century. Kinnell began by writing traditional verse, though even his early poems displayed characteristically aggressive rhythms. In one essay of Howard Nelson's collection, On the Poetry of Galway Kinnell: The Wages of Dying, Charles Bell, an early teacher at Princeton and a lifelong mentor and friend, speaks of the poet's first efforts: "In form, Kinnell was … using a romantic and Miltonic pentameter almost totally remade under impacts from Donne and the moderns—meter purposely broken up, rhymes concealed—a demonic wrestling with traditional measures" (26).

But even as early as his first book, What a Kingdom It Was, Kinnell began to alternate the use of free verse with iambic pentameter in some of the long, multipart poems which were the hallmark of the first half of his career, and when he did, he employed the same kind of discordant musicality in free verse as he did in pentameter. "Freedom, New Hampshire," an elegy for Kinnell's older brother, Derry, who was killed in an automobile accident at age 32, evinces some characteristics of this musicality. Kinnell uses onomatopoeia, repetition and clustered stresses to make sound echo and enhance the sense of what he is saying. In part three of the poem, he describes some childhood pastimes shared with Derry, here involving the making of music on combs, ultimately referring, as his poems usually do, to darkness and mortality:

Though dusk would come upon us
Where we sat, and though we had
Skirled out our hearts in the music,
Yet the dandruffed
Harps we skirled it on
Had done not much better than
Flies, which buzzed, when quick
We trapped them in our hands,
Which went silent when we
Crushed them, which we bore
Downhill to the meadowlark's
Nest full of throats
Which Derry charmed and combed
With an Arabian air, while I
Chucked crushed flies into

Innards I could not see….

Another long poem in the same book, "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World," brought him recognition. Composed of fourteen sections ranging from eight to sixty-one lines each, the poem is an ironic commentary on the reality of an immigrant neighborhood in New York City, a reality unredeemed by either Christ or the American democratic ideal. The tone of the poem is modernist; Kinnell's narrator is a distanced, omniscient voice, reminiscent of Eliot's in The Waste Land, who describes the dense, squalid life of the "Jews, Negroes, (and) Puerto Ricans" of Avenue C. The narrator not only sees the exterior reality, but also the interior one:

The figures withdraw into chambers overhead—
In the city of the mind, chambers built
Of care and necessity, where hands lifted to the blinds,
They glimpse in mirrors backed with the blackness of the world
Awkward, cherished rooms containing the familiar selves.

This interior reality is isolated and bereft of grace. In a reinterpretation of the Old Testament Abraham and Isaac story, Kinnell says,

A child lay in the flames
It was not the plan. Abraham
Stood in terror at the duplicity.
Isaac whom he loved lay in the flames.
The Lord turned away washing
His hands without soap and water
Like a common housefly.

Here, Kinnell associates the figure of the fly with betrayal of the spirit. In later poems, written after he has made the existential shift to acceptance of an unmitigated death, he uses the fly as a symbol of the last of earthly vitality. In his essay "The Poetics of the Physical World," Kinnell discusses the fly in Emily Dickinson's poem "I heard a Fly buzz—when I died." He says, "The poetics of heaven agrees to the denigration of pain and death; in the poetics of the physical world these are the very elements." He adds, "The most ordinary thing, the most despised, may be the one chosen to bear the strange brightening, this last moment of increased life."

In "Skunk Hour," the poem which closes Life Studies, the landmark book published just a year before Kinnell's first book, a normally "despised" animal is also used by poet Robert Lowell as a figure of affirmation, though the mother skunk and her "column of kittens" in that poem represent an "ambiguous" affirmation, Lowell's own word to describe it. Important differences exist between the two poets; Kinnell, for one thing, hasn't explored the self in terms of mental illness in the way that Lowell was compelled to do. And while Lowell returned to the undergirding of traditional form in the unrhymed sonnets which comprise most of his books after Life Studies, Kinnell for the most part has continued to move further away from traditional form. Both poets, however, represent the post-modern trend towards a dependence on the self for redemption, a salvation likely to come from identification with the least of earth's creatures.

Kinnell concludes this section of "Avenue C" with the only passage in the entire poem in which the narrator, still an unidentified, disembodied voice, speaks directly:

Maybe it is as the poet said,
And the soul turns to thee
O vast and well-veiled Death
And the body gratefully nestles close to thee—

I think of Isaac reading Whitman in Chicago,
The week before he died, coming across
Such a passage and muttering, Oi!
What shit! And smiling, but not for you—I mean,

For thee, Sane and Sacred Death!

Whitman would turn out to be the major influence in Kinnell's work. But while he invokes Whitman here and mimics Whitman's use of inclusive catalogue in the poem, Kinnell is not yet prepared to fully embrace Whitman's affirmative vision and still operates within the ironic mode. Granville Taylor is right when he says that for Kinnell

Existence is to be an ongoing revelation of a natural grace, but his revelation only occurs if one accepts death. These early poems hint at this vision but fail to give it adequate expression because of their concern with showing the inadequacy of a Christian concept of resurrection and immortality. Irony, after all, is rarely a vehicle for grace (Christianity and Literature. Summer, 1988).

Kinnell moves closer to a vision of "natural grace" in the poems of his second book, Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock, and especially in his third book, Body Rags, published in 1968. The title of this latter book recalls Yeats ("the foul rag and bone shop of the heart"; "A tattered coat upon a stick") with whom Kinnell shares an Irish heritage, and who provided him an important early model. Kinnell attributes his interest in long, sectioned poems to Yeats. But Kinnell departs from Yeats in a fundamental way. In "Sailing to Byzantium," Yeats yearns for the sublimation of the mortal, the transient, into the permanence of art:

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enameling.

Kinnell, on the other hand, asserts:

… for a man
as he goes up in flames, his one work
is
to open himself, to be
the flames

No permanence exists, no possibility of anything except the warmth and illumination of what is. But instead of the limitations of human life leading to meaninglessness, the major limitation, death, leads Kinnell to an assertion of the value of a fragile existence, providing a basis for his neo-romanticism. (Both Richard Calhoun, in Galway Kinnell, and Lee Zimmerman, in Intricate and Simple Things, discuss Kinnell as a neo-romantic.) Kinnell's neo-romanticism is characterized by many of the traditional tenets of that movement—belief in the importance of the imagination and of the natural world, rejection of prescribed parameters for subject matter and form—with the crucial addition necessary in our era, the ability to come to affirmation despite no hope of an afterlife. Contemporary neo-romanticism does not contrast with realism; instead, the new romantic vision embraces and incorporates a realistic perception. Indeed, affirmation gains validity from the ability to gaze unwaveringly at the worst, and most of the poems in Body Rags take on this function.

Two of the poems, "Vapor Trail Reflected in the Frog Pond" and "The Last River," deal with political issues. In the first one, Kinnell conveys his condemnation of the Vietnam War and its political era, invoking again the voice of Whitman in an ironic manner:

And I hear,
coming over the hills, America singing,
her varied carols I hear:
crack of deputies' rifles practicing their aim on stray does at night,
sput of cattleprod,
TV groaning at the smells of the human body,
curses of the soldier as he poisons, burns, grinds, and stabs
rice of the world,
with open mouth, crying strong, hysterical curses.

This 34 line, three part poem of varied line lengths reveals a general tendency of the poems in Body Rags. Though sectioned poems still predominate (17 of 23), many poems are shorter on average, and there is one poem, "The Burn," comprised of a single long stanza, a form Kinnell turns to increasingly in later work, and almost exclusively in Imperfect Thirst. Kinnell's movement toward simpler form goes back to Whitman's influence. In his introduction to The Essential Whitman, a book published in 1987, he says,

Under Whitman's spell I stopped writing in rhyme and meter and in rectangular stanzas and turned to long-lined, loosely cadenced verse; and at once I felt immensely liberated. Once again, as when I first began writing, it seemed it might be possible to say everything in poetry. Whitman has been my principal master ever since.

For Kinnell, internal form, the argument of the poem, is just as important as external form, perhaps even more important. He says, in his self-edited collection of interviews, Walking Down the Stairs (WDS) published in 1978, "poetry is a matter of vision and understanding, even awkwardly expressed, if need be …" (78).

One of the most interesting poems in Body Rags, "The Last River," explores Kinnell's experience as a civil rights worker in Louisiana in 1963. The poem takes place in a jail cell, where Kinnell spent a week as a result of his voter registration activities, and it depicts a Dantean journey. Kinnell chooses Thoreau as his guide, but where Dante's poem ends in Paradise with the immortality of the spirit, Thoreau can leave Kinnell only a legacy of death: "For Galway alone / I send you my mortality." Kinnell chooses Thoreau so that he can point out Thoreau's transgression in "Seeking … love/without human blood in it, / that leaps above / men and women, flesh and erections." Thoreau held to the eastern belief in the wisdom of ridding the self of desire. He says in Walden, "We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled; like the worms, which even in life and health, occupy our bodies." Thoreau was not impressed with Whitman, as one can imagine, knowing Whitman's blatantly sexual poems. Kinnell has Thoreau repent and realize that "he [Thoreau] loved most [his] purity." For Kinnell, Whitman's embrace of human sensuality provides one basis for affirmation.

Sensuality, because it pertains to the body, provides a connection with the animal world, and it is here that Kinnell finds another basis for affirmation, a possibility for transcendence. Kinnell says, "If the things and creatures that live on earth don't possess mystery, then there isn't any. To touch this mystery requires, I think, love of the things and creatures that surround us: the capacity to go out to them so that they enter us" (WDS 52). Body Rags concludes with two animal poems which have been among the most popular of Kinnell's, "The Bear" and "The Porcupine." In both, the poet ultimately becomes the animal, especially in terms of a fearless acceptance of the physical. In "The Bear" the speaker eats bear feces soaked in blood. In "The Porcupine" Kinnell describes what a porcupine (read human being) loves:

Adorer of ax
handles aflow with grain, of arms
of Morris chairs, of hand
crafted objects
steeped in the juice of fingertips,
of surfaces wetted down
with fist grease and elbow oil,
of clothespins that have
grabbed our body rags by underarm and crotch …
Unimpressed-bored—
by the whirl of the stars, by these
he's astonished, ultra-
Rilkean angel!

By the end of the poem, the speaker has become the porcupine:

the fatty sheath of the man
melting off
the self-stabbing coil
of bristles reversing, blossoming outward—

In these two animal poems, Kinnell has left behind his ironic voice. He is making his way toward "natural grace." But the journey involves a descent into the darkness of mortality which he accomplishes in his next book, The Book of Nightmares, a descent which yields the greatest possibility of transcendence in the births of his children.

Kinnell began writing The Book of Nightmares with Rilke in mind. He explains, speaking of the Duino Elegies:

In the Ninth Elegy, Rilke says, in effect, 'Don't try to tell the angels about the glory of your feelings, or how splendid your soul is, they know all about that. Tell them something they'd be more interested in, something that you know better than they, tell them about the things of the world.' So it came to me to write a poem called 'The Things.' Like the Elegies it would be a poem without plot, yet with a close relationship among the parts, and a development from beginning to end" (Walking Down the Stairs 35).

What began as a single ten-part sequence, after Rilke's poem which is in ten parts, eventually became the book length poem which many consider Kinnell's best work. Kinnell retains Rilke's ten-part organization, further dividing each part into seven sections. As a whole, the poem represents a meditation on spiritual isolation and corporeal decay, as well as on the one thing which ultimately rescues human existence from meaninglessness and despair—love, in this case, a parent's love for his children. But the rescue does not wipe away terror and loneliness. The "I" of the poem dwells alternately within the uncompromising reality of the natural world and the sordid confines of seedy hotel rooms, which, for Kinnell, represent the hell of human isolation. And the affirmation which rises is "a love-note/twisting under my tongue,/like the coyote's bark,/curving off, into a/howl." The affirmation provided by twentieth-century neo-romanticism still frames a tragic view of life, In "Poetry, Personality and Death," Kinnell quotes Simone Weil: "Love is not consolation, it is light."

The most beautiful passage of The Book of Nightmares is also certainly among the loveliest and most compelling passages in contemporary American poetry—Part VII, "Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight," which describes the father coming to answer his small daughter's cries in the night:

     1

You scream, waking from a nightmare.

When I sleepwalk
into your room, and pick you up,
and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me
hard,
as if clinging could save us. I think
you think
I will never die, I think I exude
to you the permanence of smoke or stars,
even as
my broken arms heal themselves around you.

The innocent faith of the child and the knowledge through experience of the adult become one, yielding the powerful bond of love between them.

     2

I have heard you tell
the sun, don't go down, I have stood by
as you told the flower, don't grow old,
don't die. Little Maud,
I would blow the flame out of your silver cup,
I would suck the rot from your fingernail,
I would brush your sprouting hair of the dying light,
I would scrape the rust off your ivory bones,
I would help death escape through the little ribs of your body,
I would alchemize the ashes of your cradle back into wood,
I would let nothing of you go, ever….

Here Kinnell's passionate, sincere voice sounds a note as far from irony as possible. He satisfies his definition of poetry, rising to the ability to "get past the censors in one's mind and say what really matters without shame or exhibitionism" (WDS 105).

Part VII concludes:

     7

Back you go, into your crib.

The last blackbird lights up his gold wings: farewell.
Your eyes close inside your head,
in sleep. Already
in your dreams the hours begin to sing.

Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight,
when I come back
we will go out together,
we will walk out together among
the ten thousand things,
each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages of dying is love.

The nature of salvation here differs radically from the traditional Christian one. For Kinnell, it is a salvation into mortality, not immortality. The epigraph that he uses from Rilke at the beginning of the book explains:

But this, though: death,
the whole of death,—even before life's begun,
to hold it all so gently, and be good:
this is beyond description!

Acceptance of death allows the freedom to live in a spirit of grace and simplicity. And a special power inheres in the birth of one's child—the self and yet not-self—for although salvation must be self-referenced, it must also lead outwardly, away from solipsistic obsession. Kinnell says in Part IV,

So little of what one is threads itself through the eye
of empty space.

Never mind.
The self is the least of it.

In The Book of Nightmares, Kinnell said he would sing "not the songs / of light said to wave/through the bright hair of angels, / but a blacker/rasping flowering on that tongue." In the interim between that book and Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, Kinnell seems to have given himself permission to sing the "songs of light," as well. The distinguishing characteristic of this 1980 book is its intense lyrical quality, exemplified in poems such as "Saint Francis and the Sow," "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps," "Wait" and "There Are Things I Tell to No One." The poems are overall much shorter and simpler in design.

In the first poem mentioned above, Kinnell turns to a full, neo-romantic acceptance of what is. He states, "everything flowers from within, of self-blessing." Everything (including everyone) must by necessity endorse his own life which is, like the sow's, homely, broken and earthy because it is mortal, vulnerable:

Kinnell's short lyric poems have sometimes been held in less esteem than his long poems. But their simplicity is often deceptive. In "Saint Francis and the Sow," while Kinnell seems to be speaking of something less significant, he is actually making clear the connection of the earthly with the spiritual, that they are one and the same, thus setting out a rationale for his uncompromising acceptance of the physical. He does this partly through the use of sound. The sounds in "from the earthen snout all the way / down through the fodder and slops …" typify the hard, Anglo-Saxon edges Kinnell like to put on his often stark descriptions of the physical. But "the spiritual curl of the tail" follows immediately with its lilting, "L" sounds. Who else would think to call the curl of a pig's tail "spiritual"? And yet, as soon as we read it, we know we have always believed it to be so.

Mortal Acts, Mortal Words contains several elegies—for Etheridge Knight, for friend Allen Planz, another for his brother Derry, and for his mother. Her poem, called simply "Goodbye," ends with lines which sum up Kinnell's philosophy: "It is written in our hearts, the emptiness is all. / That is how we have learned, the embrace is all."

Reading The Past, I enjoyed the gentle, and for Kinnell rather rare, humor of the first poem, "The Road Between Here and There" (Maud and Fergus, both names associated with Yeats, are Kinnell's children):

But the poem that struck me hard, "Man Splitting Wood in the Daybreak," did so because it possesses a fearless emotion all too rare in contemporary American poetry. Instead of the pseudo-sophistication and cynicism concerning the ability of language to communicate that many writers now cling to like a new god (as if something could hold back death, after all), I found genuineness of feeling:

We could turn to our fathers,
but they protect us only through the unperplexed
looking-back of the numerals cut into headstones.
Or to our mothers, whose love, so devastated,
can't, even in spring, break through the hard earth.
Our spouses weaken at the same rate we do.
We have to hold up our children to lean on them.
Everyone who could help goes or hasn't arrived.
What about the man splitting wood in the daybreak,
who looked strong? That was years ago. That man was me.

The Past came out in 1988, when Kinnell was 61, an age at which one naturally assumes the past contains more of one's life than the future, an age given to contemplation of that past, and there is a meditative quality to these poems. In the last poem, a three-and-a-half page, single-stanza meditation called "The Seekonk Woods," Kinnell returns to the subject of "what is," which opened Body Rags twenty years earlier. Vision has matured and developed after the passage of a generation in time, but the consistency of the message and the same distinctive diction and rhythms come through. The poem opens:

When first I walked here I hobbled
along ties set too close together
for a boy to step naturally on each.
When I grew older, I thought, my stride
would reach every other and thereafter
I would walk in time with the way
towards the meeting place of rails …

And it closes

The rails may never meet, O fellow Euclidians,
for you, for me. Never mind if we groan.
That is our noise. Laughter is our stuttering
in a language we can't speak yet. Behind,
the world made of wishes goes dark. Ahead,
if not now then never, shines only what is.

The present moment, the embrace, is what counts.

After breaking with traditional meter and the long, sectioned poem in The Past, Kinnell returns to both in his 1991 book, When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone. The title poem consists of eleven parts, each of which contains thirteen iambic pentameter lines. The poem can be viewed as a recounting of the part of Kinnell's Dantean journey which readies him to enter Paradise, the realm of love. Perhaps, then, we can see it as his Purgatorio. This poem comes after poems like the already mentioned "Wait," which is an argument against suicide, and "The Man Splitting Wood in the Daybreak," which communicates the loneliness and isolation after divorce. As he says in part ten, he learns, after long solitude and the company only of animals, that all creatures "live to mate with their kind." In part eleven he says, after the estranged one returns to "live again among men and women," that "they (the man and woman) stand in a halo of being made one: kingdom come," signaling entrance to Paradise. In this book and in poems since, Kinnell has explored the paradise of sexual love.

Some critics, attributing a lessening of intensity to Kinnell's poems after The Book of Nightmares, have concluded that his career has since gone into decline. While I see that book as a seminal work both for Kinnell and for contemporary American poetry, I see his work since not as a diminution of poetic powers, but as a satisfying and fitting extension of knowledge and ability gained, both in content and form. Imperfect Thirst bears this out, containing poems which display a mature talent at its height, poems which are deadly serious yet full of the tenderness born out of an emotional courage which comes, if one is fortunate, with age. Kinnell's defication to the clarity of the internal argument of the free verse poem has never produced better work. His wide-ranging lines of thought are as certain as spider's silk, lending an enriching complexity and delicacy to his message.

The book begins with "The Pen," a poem which quickly brought to mind a personal story. After a reading a couple of years ago, I approached Kinnell to have him sign a book of his poems. I held out the book along with my Bic pen. To my surprise, he looked rather alarmed and swiftly drew out a small leather pouch containing an obviously fine fountain pen. I felt immediately embarrassed at my transgression, though he, always gracious, obviously did not intend to cause me discomfort. "The Pen", therefore, had special significance for me, and I smiled as I read it.

The poem illustrates the ease with which Kinnell assumes what is true and important for him is so for everyone, an ability to include personal details as though they were universal references: "the pen dreams of paper, and a feeling of pressure comes into it, and, like a boy dreaming of Grace Hamilton, who sits in front of him in the fifth grade, it could spout." It also confirms that Kinnell can now speak of even the darker elements of his own life without taking himself too seriously, a charge some critics have made in the past: "I called it 'my work' when I would spend weeks on the road, often in the beds of others./This Ideal pen, with vulcanite body, can't resist dredging up the waywardness of my youth./Fortunately pens run out of ink." But mostly this poem, like so many others in the book, demonstrates how Kinnell can take a far-reaching, meditative approach and bring all the components together satisfyingly and without fanfare.

In one group of poems, the Sheffield Ghazals, Kinnell again illustrates a new mastery in terms of leaving behind the self-consciousness which some critics have pointed to in earlier work. He addresses himself, using his own name near the end of each poem. Kinnell did this in "The Last River" and The Book of Nightmares, to name two previous examples, and there it seemed awkward and overly self-important, but here, perhaps because the Ghazal form requires self-address, the technique fits, enhancing the touching effect of each poem:

This poem also shows, again, Kinnell's ability in this book to address his mortality, but not be ruled by it.

Kinnell, and the reader, have a lot of fun in some poems even while mindful of serious issues. "The Deconstruction of Emily Dickinson" vents his frustration with language cynics. "Holy Shit" quotes many other thinkers on the subject before Kinnell delivers his own message:

"Holy Shit" may be a surprise in terms of its range of humor, but not in that it addresses the physicality of human existence or makes the political statement in the last three lines quoted above. But the subject Kinnell addresses in "Lackawanna," parental sexual abuse, is a surprise, simply because it is a new subject for him. Kinnell concentrates on the effects throughout a life, even throughout generations, of the memory of such an act:

It is a great pleasure to see this master poet grow beyond the parameters of his own accomplishments and weaknesses of the past. Kinnell has never been easy to categorize; he remains a dynamic and surprising poet. But one thing does remain constant: Kinnell's bonedeep confidence in the human—after Darwin and Nietzsche, after Marx, after the great wars, the racial atrocities and assassinations of this century, after the marginalization of the human in practically every arena—reverberates throughout his work.

The closer we get to the millennium, the harder we look for those voices who can lead us away from cynicism. It may be that those who can lead us now are the quiet ones who've had sense enough to stay close to the earth, close to the music of love and desire, close to a language the body remembers. After reading Imperfect Thirst, and rereading his other books, I am more convinced than ever that Galway Kinnell is one of those voices.