The Book of Nightmares


Book Description

A book-length poem evokes the horror, anguish, and brutality of 20th century history.




The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ Into the New World


Book Description

This newly assembled volume draws from two books that were originally published in Galway Kinnell's first two decades of writing, WHAT A KINGDOM IT WAS (1960), which included the poem "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World," and FLOWER HERDING ON MOUNT MONADNOCK (1964). Kinnell has revised some of the work in this new edition, and comments on his working method in a prefatory note.




Mortal Acts, Mortal Words


Book Description




The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ Into the New World


Book Description

Advance uncorrected proofs (first printing W) of a collection of all the poems from three books: First poems, 1946-1954; What a kingdom it was; Flower herding on Mount Monadnock. The poems in First poems are as they were in the original edition; many of the poems in the other titles appear in versions slightly different from those in the original editions.







Three Books


Book Description

This volume brings together BODY RAGS and MORTAL ACTS, MORTAL WORDS and THE PAST, three books that are central to the life's work of one of the masters of contemporary poetry. Included here are many of Galway Kinnell's best-loved and most anthologized poems. Kinnell has revised some of the poems for this new edition, and comments on his working method in a prefatory note.




Torn


Book Description

An essential collection that struggles to understand our human and spiritual selves




Poetry in Person


Book Description

“In the fall of 1970, at the New School in Greenwich Village, a new teacher posted a flyer on the wall,” begins Alexander Neubauer’s introduction to this remarkable book. “It read ‘Meet Poets and Poetry, with Pearl London and Guests.’” Few students responded. No one knew Pearl London, the daughter of M. Lincoln Schuster, cofounder of Simon & Schuster. But the seminar’s first guests turned out to be John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, and Robert Creely. Soon W. S. Merwin followed, then Mark Strand and Galway Kinnell. London invited poets to bring their drafts to class, to discuss their work in progress and the details of vision and revision that brought a poem to its final version. From Maxine Kumin in 1973 to Eamon Grennan in 1996, including Amy Clampitt, Marilyn Hacker, Paul Muldoon, Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, and U.S. poet laureates Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, Louise Glück, and Charles Simic, the book follows an extraordinary range of poets as they create their poems and offers numerous illustrations of the original drafts, which bring their processes to light. With James Merrill, London discusses autobiography and subterfuge; with Galway Kinnell, his influential notion that the new nature poem must include the city and not exclude man; with June Jordan, “Poem in Honor of South African Women” and the question of political poetry and its uses. Published here for the first time, the conversations are intimate, funny, irreverent, and deeply revealing. Many of the drafts under discussion—Robert Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas,” Edward Hirsch’s “Wild Gratitude,” Robert Pinsky’s “The Want Bone”—turned into seminal works in the poets’ careers. There has never been a gathering like Poetry in Person, which brings us a wealth of understanding and unparalleled access to poets and their drafts, unraveling how a great poem is actually made.




Collected Poems


Book Description

The essential collection by the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winner who was “one of the true master poets of his generation” (The New York Times). In the words of Galway Kinnell, it is “the poet’s job to figure out what’s happening within oneself, to figure out the connection between the self and the world, and to get it down in words that have a lasting shape, that have a chance of lasting.” With this deeply probing and restlessly curious sensibility, Kinnell spend decades producing some of American poetry’s most beloved and revered works. This comprehensive volume includes Kinnell’s expansive poem of immigrant life on the Lower East Side of New York, “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World,”; his incantatory book-length poem, The Book of Nightmares; and a searing evocation of Hiroshima in “The Fundamental Project of Technology.” It covers the iconic themes of Kinnell’s middle years—eros, family, and the natural world—in works such as “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps,” “The Bear,” “Saint Francis and the Sow,” and “Blackberry Eating.” And includes the unflinchingly introspective work of his later years. Spanning six decades, this is the essential collection for old and new devotees of Galway Kinnell: “a poet of the rarest ability…who can flesh out music, raise the spirits, and break the heart” (Boston Globe).




On the Poetry of Galway Kinnell


Book Description

Traces the evolution of critical responses to the work of poet Galway Kinnell




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