A collection of more than sixty of Galway Kinnell's poems, spanning 1960-1994.

Advance uncorrected proofs (first printing W) of a collection of all the poems from three books: First poems, 1946-1954; What a kingdom it was; Flower herding on Mount Monadnock. The poems in First poems are as they were in the original edition; many of the poems in the other titles appear in versions slightly different from those in the original editions.

Traces the evolution of critical responses to the work of poet Galway Kinnell

A book-length poem evokes the horror, anguish, and brutality of 20th century history.

The Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century contains over 400 entries that treat a broad range of individual poets and poems, along with many articles devoted to topics, schools, or periods of American verse in the century. Entries fall into three main categories: poet entries, which provide biographical and cultural contexts for the author's career; entries on individual works, which offer closer explication of the most resonant poems in the 20th-century canon; and topical entries, which offer analyses of a given period of literary production, school, thematically constructed category, or other verse tradition that historically has been in dialogue with the poetry of the United States.

Writing about poetry follows models provided either by academic scholarship or literary journalism, each with its pitfalls. The former distances the reader from the poem and effaces the critic’s personality. In literary journalism, the critic is front and center, but the discussion is introductory and prioritizes value judgments. In either case, entrenched practices and patterns of privilege limit one’s perspective. The situation worsens when it comes to minoritized poets and poets from the Global South, where the focus is on restrictive notions of identity: the stylistic innovations of literary works get ousted by prefabricated historical narratives. In Worlds Woven Together, the critic, poet, and scholar Vidyan Ravinthiran searches for alternatives, pursuing close, imaginative readings of a variety of writers. His essays are open-ended, attentive, and curious, unabashedly passionate and subjective yet keenly analytical and investigative. Discussing neglected authors and those well-known in the West, Ravinthiran sees politics as inseparable from literary form and is fascinated by the relation of the creative consciousness to the violences of history. The book features essays on writers including Mir Taqi Mir, Ana Blandiana, A. K. Ramanujan, Marianne Moore, Eunice de Souza, Czeslaw Milosz, Ted Hughes, Rae Armantrout, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Galway Kinnell, Dawn Lundy Martin, and Vahni Capildeo. Revealing serendipitous connections—between poems and cultures, between lines of verse and the lives we lead—Worlds Woven Together is for all readers fascinated by the mechanics and politics of poetry.

The essential collection by the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winner who was “one of the true master poets of his generation” (The New York Times). In the words of Galway Kinnell, it is “the poet’s job to figure out what’s happening within oneself, to figure out the connection between the self and the world, and to get it down in words that have a lasting shape, that have a chance of lasting.” With this deeply probing and restlessly curious sensibility, Kinnell spend decades producing some of American poetry’s most beloved and revered works. This comprehensive volume includes Kinnell’s expansive poem of immigrant life on the Lower East Side of New York, “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World,”; his incantatory book-length poem, The Book of Nightmares; and a searing evocation of Hiroshima in “The Fundamental Project of Technology.” It covers the iconic themes of Kinnell’s middle years—eros, family, and the natural world—in works such as “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps,” “The Bear,” “Saint Francis and the Sow,” and “Blackberry Eating.” And includes the unflinchingly introspective work of his later years. Spanning six decades, this is the essential collection for old and new devotees of Galway Kinnell: “a poet of the rarest ability…who can flesh out music, raise the spirits, and break the heart” (Boston Globe).