Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Reading any poet's life's work in chronological order is invariably revelatory. Some poets' careers are full of formal changes, others' of changes of mind and temperament. Kinnell (1927–2014) changed from unshowy rhyme-and-meter to modest free verse before completing his first collection. But his main concerns and subjects remained the same, his attitude toward them altering with age. He was after the ultimates—God, immortality, fellowship—that scientific, socially atomistic existence never verifies, leaving us with only material certainty, if that. He decided to write of his own consciousness, knowledge, and condition, which entailed writing about family and friends, nature, lovemaking (intimately, tenderly), places observed and pondered (indelibly about the city in, most notably, his longest poem, "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World," and the countryside in which he kept a house in Vermont for 54 years). Although the voice in the poems is always his, his power of imaginative recreation and his cognitive scope make him—though, he grants, most limited by sex, race, nationality—seem to speak for everyone. As he proceeds through life and work, he comes to see living itself as the answer to the big questions. His masters, perhaps peers, were Whitman and Frost. Copyright 2017 Booklist Reviews.