Galway Kinnell is a former MacArthur Fellow and has been state poet of Vermont. In 1982 his Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He teaches at New York University, where he is the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing. For thirty-five years-from What A Kingdom it Was to The Book of Nightmares to Three Books -- Galway Kinnell has been enriching American poetry, not only by his poems but also by his teaching and his powerful public readings.
A New Selected Poems by Galway Kinnell
Includes:
52 Oswald Street
After Making Love We Hear Footsteps
Another Night In The Ruins
The Avenue Bearing The Initial Of Christ Into The New World
The Bear
Blackberry Eating
The Burn
The Cat
The Cellist
Cemetery Angels
Conception
Daybreak
The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible
Fergus Falling
Fire In Luna Park
First Day Of The Future
First Song
Flies
Flower Herding On Mount Monadnock
The Fly
For Robert Frost
For William Carlos Williams
Freedom, New Hampshire
The Frog Pond
The Fundamental Project Of Technology
The Hen Flower
How Many Nights
Kissing The Toad
Last Gods
Lastness: 1
Lastness: 2
Lastness: 3
Lastness: 4
Lastness: 5
Lastness: 6
Lastness: 7
Little Sleep's-head Sprouting Hair In The Moonlight
Looking At Your Face
Lost Loves
The Man In The Chair
Middle Of The Way
My Mother's R And R
Neverland
Oatmeal
The Olive Wood Fire
On The Tennis Court At Night
Parkinson's Disease
The Perch
Poem Of Night
The Porcupine
Prayer
Rapture
The River That Is East
The Road Between Here And There
Ruins Under The Stars
Running On Silk
Saint Francis And The Sow
Sheffield Ghazal 4: Driving West
Sheffield Ghazal 5: Passing The Cemetery
The Sow Piglet's Escapes
Spindrift
The Supper After The Last
That Silent Evening
To A Child In Calcutta
The Tragedy Of Bricks
Under The Maud Moon
Vapor Trail Reflected In The Frog Pond
Wait
The Waking
When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone
That Silent Evening: I will go back to that silent evening when we lay together and talked in silent voices, while outside slow lumps of soft snow fell, hushing as they got near the ground, with a fire in the room, in which centuries of tree went up in continuous ghost-giving-up, without a crackle, into morning light. Not until what hastens went slower did we sleep. When we got home we turned and looked back at our tracks twining out of the woods, where the branches we brushed against let fall puffs of sparkling snow, quickly, in silence, like stolen kisses, and where the scritch scritch scritch among the trees, which is the sound that dies inside the sparks from the wedge when the sledge hits it off center telling everything inside it is fire, jumped to a black branch, puffed up but without arms and so to our eyes lonesome, and yet also--how can we know this?--happy! in shape of chickadee. Lying still in snow, not iron-willed, like railroad tracks, willing not to meet until heaven, but here and there treading slubby kissing stops, our tracks wobble across the snow their long scratch. So many things that happen here are really little more, if even that, than a scratch, too. Words, in our mouths, are almost ready, already, to bandage the one whom the scritch scritch scritch, meaning if how when we might lose each other, scratches scratches scratches from this moment to that. Then I will go back to that silent evening, when the past just managed to overlap the future, if only by a trace, and the light doubles and casts through the dark a sparkling that heavens the earth.
From What a Kingdom It Was - 1960 - First Song
Then it was dusk in Illinois, the small boy After an afternoon of carting dung Hung on the rail fence, a sapped thing Weary to crying. Dark was growing tall And he began to hear the pond frogs all Calling on his ear with what seemed their joy.
Soon their sound was pleasant for a boy Listening in the smoky dusk and the nightfall Of Illinois, and from the fields two small Boys came bearing cornstalk violins And they rubbed the cornstalk bows with resins And the three sat there scraping of their joy.
It was now fine music the frogs and the boys Did in the towering Illinois twilight make And into dark in spite of a shoulder's ache A boy's hunched body loved out of a stalk The first song of his happiness, and the song woke His heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy.