Selected Poems - Softcover

Galway Kinnell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852245417 ISBN 13: 9781852245412

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 2001

Synopsis

Galway Kinnell is one of America's most important poets. This new selection - drawing on eight collections from "What a Kingdom It Was" (1960) to "Imperfect Thirst" (1994) - updates his 1982 "Selected Poems", which won him the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. His poetry has always been 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 gives 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 has 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.

About this title

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1852245417
• ISBN 13: 9781852245412
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192