Mortal Acts Mortal Words

by Galway Kinnell

This new collection of poetry by the author of Book of Nightmares centers on the essential relationships and occurrences which, ultimately, give life shape and meaning, especially the strength and power of the family

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Kinnell studied at Princeton University, graduating in 1948. He later obtained a Master's degree from the University of Rochester.

As a young man, Kinnell served in the US Navy and traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East. His first volume of poetry, What a Kingdom It Was, was published in 1960.

Kinnell became very involved in the U.S. civil rights movement upon his return, joining CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) as a field worker and participating in a number of marches and other civil actions.

Kinnell was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for Selected Poems (1980), a MacArthur Fellowship, a Rockefeller Grant, the 1974 Shelley Prize of the Poetry Society of America, and the 1975 Medal of Merit from National Institute of Arts and Letters. He served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007.

Reviews

[Eli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven't they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don't go too early.
You're tired. But everyone's tired.
But no one's tired enough.
Only wait a little and listen:
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time
most of all to hear
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

—"Wait," Galway Kinnell

[Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Early volume of poetry by Galway Kinnell featuring a more personal search for connections with family and the wider world.

[Scott Bielinski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poems about the responsibility and dignity of familial love. Glorious. Sobering. Wonderful.


From “The Last Hiding Places of Snow”

I have always felt
anointed by her love, its light
like sunlight
falling through broken panes
onto the floor
of a deserted house: we may go, it remains,
telling of goodness of being, of permanence.

So lighted I have believed
I could wander anywhere,
among any foulnesses, any contagions,
I could climb through the entire empty world
and find my way back and learn again to be happy. (42)

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first book I've read of his, and I really did like it. Some poems moved me, like "Wait," which reads like advice from a formerly depressed person to a currently depressed one. It's not the newest kind of sentiment, but it's really well expressed, giving shape and clarity to intense feeling:

Hair will become interesting again.
Pain will become interesting again.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Richard Hugo said semicolons are ugly. This short passage has two. There's a certain prosiness that the punctuation and the italicized is and the repetitive sentence structure give the voice, but the magic of the glove analogy really elevates it above prose, as does the way he handles the lines, which go from predictable end stops to more unexpected divisions. The sentences break free of the bounds of the line as the voice becomes more sure of itself.

Other passages don't pack the same punch, like this one from "The Still Time":

I remember those summer nights
when I was young and empty,
when I lay through the darkness
wanting, wanting,
knowing
I would have nothing of anything I wanted--
that total craving
that hollows the heart out irreversibly.

The message of this poem and "Wait" are similar: seemingly unendurable pain can be endured. I've been in the place this stanza describes, but it's not showing it to me in a new and surprising way. The lines are less interesting here, too. The double- or single-word lines in the middle of the stanza seem a little like filler. The book isn't without some filler, but even in these places you can see some intention and interesting choices. I like Kinnell just as much after reading this book and will keep looking for his titles.

Stray observations:

--"After Making Love We Hear Footsteps" is a great poem, which I'd read before reading this book. It risks being creepy, but it embraces the weirdness of sex and family in a refreshing, positive, honest, and funny way.

--"Lava" I enjoyed because I've long loved the words "pahoehoe" and "aa." He must have written some of these poems while teaching in Hawaii, the lucky bastard. It's a playful poem, and not the book's best. He kind of goes for the low-hanging fruit with some of the word- and sound-play: "pahoehoe / which is just hoi polloi of the slopes, / I don't want to call, 'ahoy! ahoy!' / and sail meekly in. Unh-unh."

--Some of the poems whose titles excited me, like "The Last Hiding Places of Snow" and "On the Tennis Court at Night," didn't really deliver the way I hoped they would.

[Regina]

One of my early favorites:


KISSING THE TOAD

Somewhere this dusk
a girl puckers her mouth
and considers kissing
the toad a boy has plucked
from the cornfield and hands
her with both hands;
rough and lichenous
but for the immense ivory belly,
like those old entrepreneurs
sprawling on Mediterranean beaches,
with popped eyes,
it watches the girl who might kiss it,
pisses, quakes, tries
to make its smile wider:
to love on, oh yes, to love on.

[Astrid · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really enjoyable collection. I got an almost Billy Collins vibe from this, and his focus on humanity's integration & involvement in nature was compelling and beautiful. I found his poems meditating on death & age to be his best, with my favorite poem being "There Are Things I Tell No-One".

[Darius Atefat-Peckham · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the great collections of poems in my opinion. The poem “Wait” (“new love is faithfulness to the old”) as well as the final poem, “Flying Home” are ones I carry with me each day since I first read them at seventeen, and with each day I live (and survive) they accrue new and further meaning:


“once the lover
recognizes the other, knows for the first time
what is most to be valued in another,
from then on, love is very much like courage,
perhaps it is courage, and even
perhaps
only courage. Squashed
out of old selves, smearing the darkness
of expectation across experience, all of us little
thinkers it brings home having similar thoughts
of landing to the imponderable world…”


Love is hard. The effort of love, the choice, and the courage to do so is in each of these luminous poems.

[Hibou le Literature Supporter · Rating 5 out of 5]

So many favorites, like "Pont Neuf at Nightfall" and "The Still Time." I like his philosophical mode most, the way there are tricks of language (echoes/repetition of words, enjambment) that he almost fights, often seems to relent to and goes along for the ride. A lot about time, separating it from happiness/sadness, after or before 'all the time has passed'. These poems ring for me well after the book is closed. From "The Apple":

"What will last is that
no one knows enough
to let go, everyone still needs to know
the one he or she doesn't know
all the way to the end of the world."

[j e rodriguez · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Tears have a history of falling."

[Lindsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some very lovely poems in this collection!

[Carl Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wonderful collection! The kind of poetry that though you may mark as "read" here you never entirely put down and go back to again and again. I like it. A lot.

[Luigi Sposato · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kinnell is a genius.

[Tracy O · Rating 5 out of 5]

You could also get his new selected collection, but this is my favorite. He goes so deep into family relationships and the way people are bonded together - it is the best "connections" poetry I have read.

[gwayle · Rating 3 out of 5]

What Kinnell lacks in subtlety he makes up for in bursts of insight and yearning and tender feeling. Parts of poems stand out for me, diamonds in the rough--I do not feel compelled to memorize any of these poems in their entirety. The first stanza of "Wait" is breathtaking.

[Melanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-reading Kinnell's works. The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker reminded me of how much I like reading poetry.

[Jim Manis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thirty years later, Kinnell still leaves me cold. Even though he was an effective mentor to a good friend and I was able to hear him read in person, I remain unimpressed.