… In his third book, Body Rags, Galway Kinnell has effected one of the most radical transformations of both matter and manner we have. His first two collections, with their perturbed pictures of the junk-ridden modern city, and their relatively straightforward presentations of the landscape, seemed to recommend withdrawal from the urban syndrome in favor of nature. Now, we feel the breadth of his interpretation of the natural ideal. "Night in the Forest" is about an overnight camping trip, but one would hardly locate conservationism at the core of its concern:

A woman
sleeps next to me on the earth. A strand
of hair flows
from her cocoon sleeping bag, touching
the ground hesitantly, as if thinking
to take root.

The intensity of this yearning is almost supernatural. Still stranger are the particular natural aspects to which attention is directed. Kinnell writes about features ordinary nature poets, who are apt to moralize, deplore. "I can rejoice," he writes, "that everything changes, that / we go from life into life / and enter ourselves / quaking / like the tadpole, his time come, rumbling toward the slime." The romantic image of landscape is absent, and regions of rocks, roots, and seethings prevail. They represent, I think, arenas of intense natural struggle, areas where change is most conspicuous.

The leap from the crags of landscape to those of the body is a short, not to mention traditional, one. Kinnell's analogies are surprising, involving common qualities of alteration. Even outward nature takes on an inwardness. "The Porcupine, a poem which might otherwise pass as a strong example of objective description, in its climactic moment relates quite directly to this:

A farmer shot a porcupine three times
as it dozed on a tree limb. On
the way down it tore open its belly
on a broken branch, hooked its gut,
and went on falling. On the ground
it sprang to its feet, and
paying out gut heaved
and spartled through a hundred feet of goldenrod
before
the abrupt emptiness.

When in "Testament of the Thief," all that the poet bequeaths is summarized as "this map of my innards", it is a serious matter. When, in "One Who Used To Beat His Way," the narrator becomes ill and "gets a backed-up / mouthful of vomit-cut liquor, [mumbling] 'Thanks God,'" it is no joke. There is a thankfulness for, a sense of the worth of, essences.

As the long quotation above may suggest, the poetry itself moves according to some internal—not to mention intestinal—principle. One feels that the body, like the landscape and its animals, is partly a metaphor for the nature of poetry. The porcupine poem is followed by one about the poet's fight with a bear; after he kills it, he enters it. The poem closes (and the book ends) with the hunter imagining himself spending his life wondering "what, anyway, / was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived." The sole outright ars poetica in Body Rags insists on the identity of raw nature and true poetry. "The Poem" begins:

On this hill, crossed
by the last birds, a sprinkling
of soil covers up the rocks

…..

The poem too
is a palimpsest, streaked
with erasures, smelling
of departure and burnt stone.

The "burnt", "rank", bitter flavor seems to me to come not out of any established sense of the "ironical", as cultivated in the most pervasive poetics of the early part of our century (those of Eliot and his immediate followers), but as the result of an attempt to reduce—or elevate—art to essence. One of the most remarkable passages in "The Poem" expresses this ambition. It closes commenting on one of the most celebrated of all lines in verse, Villon's "où sont les neiges d'antan" (Kinnell has translated Villon, and there are references to that flesh-haunted medieval throughout this book, straight through to its title). The American poet answers the French poet's "where" with his own "here":

That a strong, lofty art can become a kind of rock, a reality to rest upon, is a remarkable, thoroughly modern assertion; this kind of elevation of the role of the intellect is of course exactly the opposite of the poetic view of, say, the generation of Eliot. These poems have what I would call (borrowing a phrase from certain contemporary, post-minimalist sculptors) an "object quality". Much of Body Rags not only asserts possibility, but is memorable enough to demonstrate it….