Collected Poems

“It’s 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 certain shape, that have a chance of lasting.” — Galway Kinnell

This long-awaited volume brings together for the first time the life’s work of a major American voice.

In a remarkable generation of poets, Galway Kinnell was an acknowledged, true master. From the book-length poem memorializing the grit, beauty, and swarming assertion of immigrant life along a lower Manhattan avenue, to searing poems of human conflict and war, to incandescent reflections on love, family, and the natural world—including "Blackberry Eating,” "St. Francis and the Sow," and “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps”—to the unflinchingly introspective poems of his later life, Kinnell’s work lastingly shaped the consciousness of his age.

Spanning sixty-five years of intense, inspired creativity, this volume, with its inclusion of previously uncollected poems, is the essential collection for old and new devotees of a “poet of the rarest ability . . . who can flesh out music, raise the spirits, and break the heart” (Boston Globe).

GALWAY KINNELL (1927–2014) was a former MacArthur fellow and State Poet of Vermont. In 1982, his Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He was the cofounder and longtime mentor of the graduate creative writing program at New York University.?