Readers with only a casual, or dutiful, interest in poetry seek out poets they can be comfortable with. Shades of the schoolhouse begin to close round such readers when poems require too much deciphering. So, according to their temperaments, they will gravitate to poets of amiability or moral earnestness, whose work they will reward with a knowing chuckle or an approving nod.

Among contemporary poets few can rival Galway Kinnell for sheer amiability. The press kit accompanying his twelfth collection, Imperfect Thirst, declares, "One of the foremost performers on the poetry circuit, Kinnell inevitably draws enormous crowds with his readings." He is a Pulitzer winner, a MacArthur fellow, and the poet laureate of Vermont, where Hugh Schultz, who owns the Wheelock Village Store, has saluted the poet as "a hometown body" and "a heckuva nice guy, real easy going, low-key." If ever a poet had to be found to endorse a new brand of bran flakes, here is the man.

In the world according to Kinnell death is, unproblematically, an aspect of life in Vermont.

One might ask of such a death where its sting is, but surely a poet is entitled to imagine his own death in whatever terms he likes. There is nothing wrong with being comfy. Comfy feels good, and it is Kinnel's mission as a poet to share his good feelings with his readers, as when at the close of another poem, "The Music of Poetry," Kinnell finds himself.

… here in St. Paul, Minnesota, where I lean
at a podium trying to draw my talk to a close,
or a time zone away on Bleecker Street in New York,
where only minutes ago my beloved may have
put down her book and drawn up her eiderdown
around herself and turned out the light—
now, causing me to garble a few words
and tangle my syntax, I imagine I can hear
her say my name into the slow waves
of the night and, faintly, being alone, sing….