A New Selected Poems

by Kinnell, Galway

• ISBN13: 9780618154456
• ISBN10: 0618154450
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-09-13
• Publisher: Mariner Books

Summary

That Silent EveningI 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.

Author Biography

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. For many years he was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University. He is currently a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. For thirty-five years--from WHAT A KINGDOM IT WAS to THE BOOK OF NIGHTMARES to THREEE BOOKS--Galway Kinnell has been enriching American poetry, not only by his poems but also by his teaching and his powerful public readings.

Table of Contents

Author's Note	xi
FROM What a Kingdom It Was 1960
First Song	3	(1)
For William Carlos Williams	4	(1)
Freedom, New Hampshire	5	(4)
The Supper After the Last	9	(3)
The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World	12	(17)
FROM Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock 1964
The River That Is East	29	(2)
For Robert Frost	31	(4)
Poem of Night	35	(2)
Middle of the Way	37	(2)
Ruins Under the Stars	39	(2)
Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock	41	(6)
FROM Body Rags 1968
Another Night in the Ruins	47	(2)
Vapor Trail Reflected in the Frog Pond	49	(2)
The Burn	51	(1)
The Fly	52	(1)
The Correspondence School Instructor Says Goodbye to His Poetry Students	53	(1)
How Many Nights	54	(1)
The Porcupine	55	(4)
The Bear	59	(6)
FROM The Book of Nightmares 1971
Under the Maud Moon	65	(5)
The Hen Flower	70	(4)
The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible	74	(5)
Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight	79	(4)
Lastness	83	(8)
FROM Mortal Acts, Mortal Words 1980
Fergus Falling	91	(2)
After Making Love We Hear Footsteps	93	(1)
Saint Francis and the Sow	94	(1)
Wait	95	(1)
Daybreak	96	(1)
Blackberry Eating	97	(1)
Kissing the Toad	98	(1)
On the Tennis Court at Night	99	(2)
The Last Hiding Places of Snow	101	(4)
Looking at Your Face	105	(1)
Fisherman	106	(1)
52 Oswald Street	107	(1)
A Milk Bottle	108	(5)
FROM The Past 1985
The Road Between Here and There	113	(2)
Conception	115	(1)
The Sow Piglet's Escapes	116	(1)
The Olive Wood Fire	117	(1)
The Frog Pond	118	(2)
Prayer	120	(1)
Fire in Luna Park	121	(1)
Cemetery Angels	122	(1)
On the Oregon Coast	123	(1)
First Day of the Future	124	(1)
The Fundamental Project of Technology	125	(2)
The Waking	127	(3)
That Silent Evening	130	(3)
FROM When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone 1990
The Tragedy of Bricks	133	(2)
The Cat	135	(2)
Oatmeal	137	(2)
The Perch	139	(2)
The Room	141	(1)
Last Gods	142	(2)
Farewell	144	(2)
When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone	146	(13)
FROM Imperfect Thirst 1994
My Mother's R & R	159	(1)
The Man in the Chair	160	(2)
The Cellist	162	(2)
Running on Silk	164	(2)
The Deconstruction of Emily Dickinson	166	(2)
Sheffield Ghazal 4: Driving West	168	(1)
Sheffield Ghazal 5: Passing the Cemetery	169	(1)
Parkinson's Disease	170	(2)
Rapture	172	(2)
Flies	174	(4)
Neverland	178

Excerpts

From What a Kingdom It Was 1960 First SongThen 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. Copyright 2000, 2001 by Galway Kinnell

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Excerpted from A New Selected Poems by Galway Kinnell, Galway Kinnell
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