PoetryGalway Kinnell is heir to a tradition in American poetry that includes two of his guiding spirits, Whitman and Frost, poets with a strong impulse towards celebration of home ground.
Like Whitman, he writes from the heart of a particular American experience that shifts between rural and urban settings and, in the process, has, like the author of Leaves of Grass, taken on the abundance of life.
Kinnell has been one of the most accomplished and memorable voices in American poetry for the past 50 years; that he remains so is confirmed by this remarkable and fresh collection, his first in over a decade and one full of the resonances we might expect from such songs of experience.
Unlike the aloofness of tone we might associate with Stevens or the spontaneity of touch to be found in William Carlos Williams, the utterance in a Kinnell poem is always delivered with a voice that is vigorous and declarative in the reach for self-knowledge and what he once described as "what is beyond us". The sharp observation and austere intelligence combine to give us poems of witness and affirmation. A true poet of the inner life, it comes as no surprise to find here a poem that acknowledges that he once thought of himself as one who
followed Shelley,
who thought he was following radiant
desire
In this body of recent work, there is a return to some familiar terrain and thematic preoccupations, to what has been described as the poet's kinship with nature - in fact a love of every living thing that comes into his range of vision.
LOVE AND DEATH stalk the pages of this collection, the title of which is taken from Whitman: "Strong is your hold O mortal flesh,/ Strong is your hold O love". Here he once again combines - quite powerfully - his deft command of precise language with the gift of clear-sightedness. His attention to the natural world brings out in his work a deep affinity with creatures of the earth, and it is not always the more majestic side of nature that engages him either. Kinnell is a poet who finds wonder in the small splendours -
Now jay and hawk stare
At each other beak to beak
As close as Jesus and Judas at their kiss.
(Ode and Elegy)
This is also a book of intimate and tender music - elegies and laments: stunningly beautiful lyrics for two fellow-travellers, the poets James Wright and Jane Kenyon, the latter with its aching evocation of the day of death that came to close Kenyon's "year of pain":
How could she not
rise and go with sunlight at the window,
and the drone, fading, deepening, hard to say,
of a single-engine plane, in the distance,
coming for her, that no-one else hears?
The elegiac note is also carried over into a wonderfully lucid short lyric - Promissory Note- in which he confronts his own mortality and the likelihood that he will predecease his much younger wife.
As in many of his previous collections, family and domestic situations provide a rich source of material, to which Kinnell's poetic sensibility responds with thoughtful delight in poems such as Everyone Was In Love, It All Comes Backand Inés on Vacation- have offspring ever been so celebrated by their poet-father as the Fergus and Maud of these familial narratives? In Pulling a Nail, one of the collection's standout poems, the nail in question becomes emblematic of the bond, across time, between the poet and his own father - the father hammering in the nail in the year of the poet's birth, the son now trying to unloose it and hearing the
first sound it has made since
my father brought down his hammer,
full force on it, adding a grunt of his own
and thudded it home . . .
In one of a sequence of virtuoso stanzas, Kinnell describes this act of undoing as "transrealmic combat/ between father and son".
To great effect, he tends to use a fluent narrative style in those poems that spring from the territory of home and marriage and filial or parental love. Thankfully he is a poet unafraid of the lyric "I", which is nowadays spurned by so many of the commissars of the creative writing class.
Many artists - novelists, composers, singer-songwriters - have responded to the 9/11 atrocity in New York. Kinnell does so here in When the Towers Fell, a moving, 13-section meditation that stands at the centre of this collection, in a version that here bears the mark of Kinnell's own self-interrogation and rigorous rewriting of his work, since it first appeared in the New Yorker.
With its vividly apocalyptic tone, the poem renders a world in flux, and catches the sense of vacancy that must have been created on that fateful day when the "glassy blocks" went "rolling outward/ the way, in the days of the gods, a god/ might rage through the streets, overtaking the fleeing".
THE INCLUSION OF a CD of Kinnell reading all of the poems in this collection is a great bonus - the deep baritone of his seasoned voice is hypnotic, amplifying the interplay between image and music.
In another of the book's elegies, The Scattering of Evan Jones' Ashes, he speaks of a particular friend as "this ardent man/ who, as he grew older, more and more/ gave himself to his love of poetry". We must be grateful that Galway Kinnell has given so much of himself to poetry. He should, like those forefathers of American poetry who were his pathfinders, be "absorbed into the affections of his country" and of those poetry-lovers who recognise enduring and exemplary art.
• Gerard Smyth is a poet and an Irish Timesjournalist. His collection, The Mirror Tent, has just been published by Dedalus
• Strong Is Your HoldBy Galway Kinnell Bloodaxe Books, £8.95
