Sane and Sacred Death

...The birth of Kinnell's two children brought him a new emotional freedom...

...since we won't be living more than a few weeks longer...

...dappled with color, with cats./more cats than I can believe...

...In Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980), Kinnell extended his expressions of feeling beyond his children to speak poignantly of his love for former students ("Goodbye"), a hobo he once knew ("Memory of Wilmington"), and, above all, his wife ("Flying Home...

...He was particularly affected by the Vietnam War: Two poems of that era, "Vapor Trail Reflected in the Frog Pond" and "The Dead Shall be Raised Incorruptible," transcend the limited rhetoric of so much protest verse to movingly evoke outrage and helplessness...

...But in "There Are Things I Tell to No One," he confesses that his obsession with darkness is partly a search for "a music of grace/that we hear, sometimes, playing to us/from the other side of happiness...

...The poem is a meditation on the wretchedness of New York's Lower East Side, where the melting pot has turned into an incinerator of the American Dream...

...The author concludes, "So the world woos its children back for an evening kiss...

...Medical details disappear from the letters, to be replaced with boasts of rare sightings...

...And a prophetic vision is vouchsafed to an ancient Negro in dark glasses????he sees German death camps across the East River...

...Van Duyn has the rare gift of delicacy, and a wry humor that protects it from bathos in the face of death...

...Readers can now see how all along Kinnell has been striving toward an affirmative poetry that celebrates mortality and the pleasures of the flesh...

...Letters From A Father derives its strongest images from nature...

...With her characteristic bluntness, Emily Dickinson admitted, "I like the look of Agony./Because I know it's true...

...He dreams of a reconciliation between the two where the noise "disappears into that music/which carries our time on earth away/on the great catafalque/of spine marrowed with god's-flesh...

...Their only remaining interest is their ailments, real and imaginary...

...Kinnell, too, is drawn to death's "homely anguish" and has sought out subjects that delineate suffering...

...A yelp of pain does not sound very different from an orgasmic cry to Kinnell...

...In such a poem, Galway Kinnell glories in mortality????the only condition we know well enough to truly desire...

...The aggressiveness of the small creatures begins to appeal to him, however, and soon he is asking for a book on birds and studying up on their habits...

...the log cabins/ nose an immense cow-pie of mist/that lies on the lakes...

...In his first major work, "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World" (from Whata Kingdom It Was, 1960), his outlook is dark indeed...

...Two atavistic poems at the close of Body Rags (1968) demonstrate this: In "The Porcupine" he rejoices over the kinship between man and a prickly beast as tenacious as ourselves, and in "The Bear" an aboriginal hunter who is the narrator tracks a bear by mystically identifying with it...

...In "At Pere Lachaise" (the Paris cemetery), a gloomy expedition to find the grave of Marcel Proust is brightened by the sight of "two of thegreat dun tombs...

...Even when Kinnell sounded his blackest notes, though, jubilation often trumpeted through in an exuberant recognition of the will to survive...

...In this early work, Kinnell could face pain only through resignation...

...One could tell that Van Duyn is a fanner's daughter from the perfect opening lines of "Moose in the Morning, Northern Maine," where " at sixA.M...

...Husband and wife are in failing health...

...Criticizing what he perceives as a frivolity, he crustily reminds her, "You know when I farmed I used to like to hunt/and we had many a good meal from pigeons/and quail and pheasant but these birds won't/be good for nothing and are dirty to have so near/the house...

...Love's compelling power is paid a comic tribute in "The Ballad of Blossom," as the mating of a cow transforms the countryside: At supper, laughter begins and ends, for the mood is soft and shy, One couple is seen to be holding hands over wild rasberry pie...

...On another block, "The crone who sells the News and the Mirror,/The oldest living thing on Avenue C," is the Great Mother...

...Recollecting a last loving gesture from her mother the night before she died, Van Duyn is struck that affection should have been offered after a lifetime of reserve, even estrangement, between daughter and parent...

...Thinking of the Phoenix????that symbol of Resurrection????in "Another Night in the Ruins," he responded: How many nights must it take one such as me to learn that we aren't, after all, made from that bird which flies out of its ashes that for a man as he goes up in flames, his one work is to open himself, to be theflames...

...His subsequent verse has gone beyond passivity in suffering to wrest joy out of misery...

...In "The Stream," she perceives this sentiment as "a narrow stream running urgently/far below ground, held down by rocky layers," the repressions and frustration of desires, and herself as a diviner searching for it with trembling wand: the untaught dowser believes, does not believe, and finally simply stands on the ground above till a sliver of stream finds a crack and makes its way slowly, too slowly, through rock and earth and clay...

...Mona Van Duyn mourns the death of her parents in Letters From A Father And Other Poems (Atheneum,63 pp., $11.95...

...The title poem tells its story through a series of epistles from a crotchety old man to his daughter...

...The daughter gives them a bird feeder, and the old man chides her for "a terrible waste of your money...

...Like those Medieval painters who portray the Holy Family or Dido and Aeneas against the backdrop of the artist's native village, Kinnell brings Biblical and mythological scenes to Avenue C. A patriarch "in a black fur shtraimel," walking among his sons, becomes Jacob mourning Joseph...

...Isaac is accidentally sacrificed in a trash barrel fire, while Abraham watches in horror as "The Lord turned away washing/His hands without soap and water/Like a common housefly...

...Since then many American poets havefollowed his bold attempt to free loss and decay from conventional morbidity...

...With these transitional poems, Kinnell became more than another author of lamentations...

...Galway Kinnell's verse, particularly, is haunted by this theme, and his new Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin, 148 pp., $12.50) provides an excellent retrospective...

...When lamps go out and the moon lays light on the lake like a great beachtowel, Eros wings down on a fir to sit and hoot like a Long-eared owl...

...In the nighttime Of the blood they are laughing and saying, Our little lane, what a kingdom it was...

...In this revelation, modern cruelties only compound age-old wrongs: The heart beats without windows in its night, The lungs put out the light of the world as they Heave and collapse, the brain turns and rattles In its own black axlegrease...

...Death is still a tangible presence...

...Here at my feet I see, after sixty years, the welling water????to which I add these tears...

...These Selected Poems shine with an intensity that encompasses death and life...

...pelvis that makes angels shiver to know down here we mortals make love with our bones...

...Recalling the birth of his son, Kinnell describes how When he came wholly forth I took him up in my hands and bent over and smelted the black glistening fur of his head, as empty space must have bent over the newborn planet and smelted the grasslands and the ferns...

...After the hunt is over, and the animal eaten, "the rest of my days I spend/wandering: wondering/what, anyway,/was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived...

...Although The Book of Nightmares (1971) is full of the terrors afflicting new parents who suddenly realize they have given hostages to fortune, it also radiates Kinnell's love for his babies...

...These mean streets are inhabited by "the wiped-out lives????Punks, lushes/Panhandlers, pushers, rumsoaks, everyone/Who took it easy when he should have been out failing at something...

...Kinnell has traveled quite a distance down this road...

...This vignette of life quite literally at the brink of the grave is only one of the joys of this beautiful book...