Gallway Kinnell's poetry is collected in this definitive book. As a poetry buff, I find this book essential to my collection of contemporary poetry. Highly recommend.

My first introduction to Kinnell's work. A beautiful collection, well worth the read!

Kinnell is major late 20th century American poet and the work collected here is a superb resource for students, writers, and lovers of poetry.

A selection of beautiful, moving poems, spanning the time frame of Galway Kinnell's life. Nature poems with striking images and emotions that reach out from the carefully chosen words he uses. Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for letting me review this book. Would recommend.

This book brings out the rich spiritual nature one can find in life at any age.

Reading a volume of any good poet’s entire oeuvre feels like unburying pirate’s treasure, but when the poet is a great poet, as is Kinnell, diving in is akin to discovering the mountain of golden treasure guarded by the dragon in The Hobbit. Again and again in this volume Kinnell reenacts the themes of presence and absence in a thousand and more different contexts, capturing the death within life and the life within death with recurring images of bones, flesh, grass, cows, woods, cities, and all manner of other things. His imagery is finely interwoven with rich allusions to other texts and presented in his own distinctive cadences. He leaves the reader grateful for life despite its evanescence.

The reader could begin well with his Whitmanesque poem, “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World,” and enjoy its recreation of a vibrant, multifaceted New York City neighborhood. My personal favorites are the poems in 1971’s The Book of Nightmares, dedicated to his children Maud and Fergus. In these poems the awareness of new lives, loved passionately, is juxtaposed with reminders of death and transience; one senses a sometimes frantic wish to hold on tight even in defiance of the inability to do so. “When the Towers Fell” is one of the finest poems written on the tragedy of 9/11. Kinnell is a master at memorializing the dead, not only in this poem, but in poems about friends, family members, and other writers--perhaps because he fully understands that life is both precious and precarious.

3.5 Stars

"Darkness swept the earth in my dream,
Cold crowded streets with its wings,
Cold talons pursued each river and stream
Into the mountains, found out their springs
And drilled the dark world with ice."

This is the kind of poetry I love. Verses aren't just sentences broken into parts; instead they have meaning that's not always glaringly obvious but at the same time I don't have to create a research project to decipher them. His words spoke to me, some more than others, but his emotions were present in them all.

"I sat here as a boy
On these winter rocks, watching
The moon-shapes toil through the nights
I thought then the moon
Only wears her mortality."

I hadn't heard of Kinnell before this, but what better way to be introduced to a great poet than by reading his collected poems? I loved starting and ending my day by reading a handful of his poems.

This book is thick (over 600 pages), and I'll admit I didn't enjoy every poem, but on a whole I would recommend this collection to any poetry lover.

"We wander slowly homeward, lost
in the history of every step."

You can't read Galway Kinnell without a sense of the spiritual in everyday life. His collected works are a real treat.

Kinnell produced poems so deceptively simple they appear to take a sideways look at the universe from ordinary life and thoughts. Everyday speculations appear to be a universe outside of the everyday.

As with all poetry, it may not be a style for everyone but Kinnell was a brilliant poetical voice that gave beautiful poems throughout his career.

I would definitely recommend this book for people who love poetry as well as for those who shy away from the esoteric. This book brings out the rich spiritual nature one can find in life at any age.

The Collected Poems of Galway Kinnell by Galway Kinnell is a collection of sixty-five years of writing. Kinnell, a Navy veteran, experienced Europe and the Middle East while serving. He was also involved in the civil rights movement. Kinnell was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for Selected Poems and he studied at Princeton and earned his Master's degree from the University of Rochester.

The tome of the work is presented in several sections reflecting publications and time. His earlier work takes the form of more traditional poetry with sights and feelings of his ports of call in the navy, particularly France and India.

What storms have blown me, and from where,
What dreams have drowned, or half dead, here
...
Each year I lived I watched the fissure
Between what was and what I wished for
Widen, until there was nothing left
But the gulf of emptiness.

The traditional form is partly owed to his admiration of Walt Whitman. He then moves to more of a "Beat" type of poetry. His work seems influenced by the movement even though he was not an active participant. His work in the late 1960s and 1970s moves much more into nature poems:

On the tidal mud just before sunset, 
dozens of starfishes
were creeping. It was
as though the mud were a sky
and enormous, imperfect stars
moved across it slowly
as the actual stars cross heaven

In the 1980s through the 2000s Kinnell finds himself writing as an experienced sage.  He relies on his personal experience and knowledge to create his mature works.  Here, the poems reflect on aging and the death of those who were close and the lives of his children. Kinnell also speaks frequently of religion, but not in the most positive sense. His short poem "Prayer":

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

He had a strong dislike for Christianity.  Some of that can be seen in the long poem, written in the early 1960s, "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World":

A roadway of refuse from the teeming shores and ghettos
And the Caribbean Paradise, into the new ghetto and new paradise,
This God-forsaken Avenue bearing the initial of Christ.

Before reading this collected works, I had not read any Kinnell poetry.  Although I was impressed with several poems his two most anthologized poems slipped by me-- "St. Francis and the Sow" and "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps".  His poems from the from the 1970s and later poems appealed the most to me.  The widespread of his poetry and the evolving topics will sure to find favor with other readers with different tastes than my own.  As a collected work, Kinnell's poems, show his growth and refinement as a poet.  The introduction by Edward Hirsch will give the reader ample information and background on the poet and his poems.  A well-done collection that will allow the reader to pick and choose his or her favorite topics or simply give the reader something to pick up and randomly read.

I had not heard of Kinell before reading this collection, but I was pleasantly surprised by his work.