Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Galway Kinnell was one of America's major modern poets. This new selection – drawing on eight collections from What a Kingdom It Was (1960) to Imperfect Thirst (1994) – updated his 1982 Selected Poems, which won him the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. His poetry was always marked by precise, furious intelligence, by rich aural music, by devotion to the things and creatures of the world, and by transformations of every understanding into singing, universal art. These constants appear in a dazzling range of poems: from odes of kinship with nature to realistic evocations of urban life, from religious quest to political statement, from brief imagistic lyrics to extended, complex meditations.
This selection shows how the traditional Christian sensibility of his early work gave way to the sacramental, transfiguring dimension of the later poetry, which 'burrows fiercely into the self away from traditional sources of religious authority or even conventional notions of personality' (Richard Gray).
As Kinnell once said: 'If you could keep going deeper and deeper, you'd finally not be a person...you'd be a blade of grass or ultimately perhaps a stone. And if a stone could speak, poetry would be its words.' Through the poem, Kinnell throws off the 'sticky infusion' of speech and - like the hunter in his celebrated poem The Bear - becomes one with the natural world, sharing in the primal experiences of birth and death.
'There are few others writing today in whose work we feel so strongly the full human presence. His language tantalises us with a foretaste of meaning, an underlying emotional logic that recalls Whitman's I am the man, I suffer'd, I was there. Like all good poetry, his finest poems attract and mesmerise us before we really understand them' - Morris Dickstein, New York Times Book Review
Galway Kinnell (1927-2014)
Galway Kinnell reads four poems from his Selected Poems (‘Saint Francis and the Sow’, ‘Daybreak’, ‘Parkinson’s Disease’, ‘Rapture’) and two from Strong Is Your Hold (‘Everyone Was in Love’ and ‘Insomniac’). Pamela Robertson-Pearce filmed Kinnell reading a selection of his poems at his home in Sheffield, Vermont, in September 2007. This film is from the DVD-anthology In Person: 30 Poets, filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce & edited by Neil Astley (Bloodaxe Books, 2008).
