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

This newly assembled volume draws from two books that were originally published in Galway Kinnell's first two decades of writing, WHAT A KINGDOM IT WAS (1960), which included the poem "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World," and FLOWER HERDING ON MOUNT MONADNOCK (1964). Kinnell has revised some of the work in this new edition, and comments on his working method in a prefatory note.

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.

This volume brings together BODY RAGS and MORTAL ACTS, MORTAL WORDS and THE PAST, three books that are central to the life's work of one of the masters of contemporary poetry. Included here are many of Galway Kinnell's best-loved and most anthologized poems. Kinnell has revised some of the poems for this new edition, and comments on his working method in a prefatory note.

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

An essential collection that struggles to understand our human and spiritual selves

From his earliest years, Gamal Rahman was a troublemaker. By the time The Devil: an Interview is published, Gamal is living in exile in England. Publicly damned and burned by incensed Muslims in the Yorkshire city of Bruddersford, his book generates communal upheaval. Racial tensions erupt. Muslim girls, inspired by the fourteen-year-old Fatima, embark on a bitter strike to defend their right to wear the scarf of modesty in school. While the claims of women fuel the flames, young men embrace the Sons of Allah, dedicated to the execution of the apostate author Gamal Rahman. What should a writer owe to himself, and what to society?

“In the fall of 1970, at the New School in Greenwich Village, a new teacher posted a flyer on the wall,” begins Alexander Neubauer’s introduction to this remarkable book. “It read ‘Meet Poets and Poetry, with Pearl London and Guests.’” Few students responded. No one knew Pearl London, the daughter of M. Lincoln Schuster, cofounder of Simon & Schuster. But the seminar’s first guests turned out to be John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, and Robert Creely. Soon W. S. Merwin followed, then Mark Strand and Galway Kinnell. London invited poets to bring their drafts to class, to discuss their work in progress and the details of vision and revision that brought a poem to its final version. From Maxine Kumin in 1973 to Eamon Grennan in 1996, including Amy Clampitt, Marilyn Hacker, Paul Muldoon, Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, and U.S. poet laureates Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, Louise Glück, and Charles Simic, the book follows an extraordinary range of poets as they create their poems and offers numerous illustrations of the original drafts, which bring their processes to light. With James Merrill, London discusses autobiography and subterfuge; with Galway Kinnell, his influential notion that the new nature poem must include the city and not exclude man; with June Jordan, “Poem in Honor of South African Women” and the question of political poetry and its uses. Published here for the first time, the conversations are intimate, funny, irreverent, and deeply revealing. Many of the drafts under discussion—Robert Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas,” Edward Hirsch’s “Wild Gratitude,” Robert Pinsky’s “The Want Bone”—turned into seminal works in the poets’ careers. There has never been a gathering like Poetry in Person, which brings us a wealth of understanding and unparalleled access to poets and their drafts, unraveling how a great poem is actually made.