Selected Poems
by Galway Kinnell
Summary
Selected Poems draws together work from across Galway Kinnell's career up to the early 1980s, pulling pieces from earlier books including Body Rags and his long poem sequence The Book of Nightmares, alongside newer work. The book has no single subject the way a single collection would; instead it traces an evolving body of work that returns again and again to encounters with animals, bears above all, and to fatherhood, aging, and death, following Kinnell's own movement from an early, more urban voice toward the elemental, physical poetry that became his signature.
Two poems from the volume are among the most anthologized in American poetry. "Saint Francis and the Sow" builds its whole argument around a single image, a farmer's pig reimagined through the saint's own gift for blessing, arguing that everything carries within it the memory of its own loveliness, and that sometimes it takes a reteller to remind it. "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps" turns an ordinary domestic scene, a couple interrupted by a child climbing into their bed, into a meditation on love, mortality, and the animal tenderness of parenthood. Across the book Kinnell writes in long, propulsive lines built for reading aloud, favoring a prophetic, incantatory register over understatement, unafraid of grief or of naming an emotion directly.
Reading Selected Poems means encountering a poet at full stretch, comfortable in both brutal physical imagery, an animal's death, a body's decay, and unguarded tenderness toward children and lovers. It suits a reader who wants poetry that commits fully to feeling rather than circling it, and it works as a strong introduction to a poet whose reputation rests as much on live readings as on the page, since the long lines were built to be spoken.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave Galway Kinnell the 1983 Prize for Poetry for Selected Poems, over finalists Jack Gilbert's Monolithos and Charles Wright's Country Music, and the same book won that year's National Book Award for Poetry as well, shared with Wright's Country Music, a rare instance of one collection taking both major American poetry prizes at once. Kinnell had graduated from Princeton in 1948 alongside fellow poet W. S. Merwin, and spent the 1960s active in the civil rights movement with the Congress of Racial Equality in Louisiana before becoming an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War.
Kinnell went on to serve as Vermont's poet laureate from 1989 to 1993 and taught for decades at New York University. Selected Poems was later included in Harold Bloom's survey of major works, The Western Canon, a mark of how firmly the book had entered the standard account of postwar American poetry. Kinnell died in Sheffield, Vermont, in 2014.