Selected Poems - Softcover

Kinnell

4.21

436 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0395320461 ISBN 13: 9780395320464

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin (Trade), 1983

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The poems in this volume have been newly selected by Galway Kinnell from his eight collections published between 1960 and 1994: What a Kingdom It Was; Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock; Body Rags; The Book of Nightmares; Mortal Acts, Mortal Words; The Past; When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone; and Imperfect Thirst. Occasional revisions are addressed by Kinnell in a prefatory note. The life of this American poet is glimpsed over the years -- his childhood in New England, the early death of his brother, an exuberant youth in New York City, a wife and children, aloneness and new love. The natural world serves as backdrop to this life's journey, informing the philosophical and political poems as well as the personal works gathered in A New Selected Poems.

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Review:

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

Kinnell is a poet of the rarest ability, the kind who comes once or twice in a generation, who can flesh out music, raise the spirits and break the heart. --Liz Rosenberg, Boston Globe

About the Author:

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1927, Galway Kinnell made his living mostly from teaching from 1949 to 2005, in France, Iran and Australia as well as at colleges and universities across America. He was Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University for many years, and served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. In 1982 his SELECTED POEMS won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. An updated and expanded edition was published as SELECTED POEMS by Bloodaxe in Britain in 2001. He has also published several translations, including books by Goll, Lorca, Rilke and Villon, and Yves Bonnefoy's ON THE MOTION AND IMMOBILITY OF DOUVE in the Bloodaxe Contemporary French Poets series (1992). His latest collection, STRONG IS YOUR HOLD, published with an audio CD in 2007 by Bloodaxe, includes his long poem "When the Towers Fell", a requiem for those who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11 in direct view of his New York apartment. He now lives only in a remote part of northern Vermont, in the house he bought as a wreck in the 60s, where he has written much of his work.

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