Within the objects of Kinnell’s language,
there is an insistence on the ordinary object as
the right carrier for meaning; as if more exalted
objects could only blur or distort the precise
fitting the exact adjustment of language to real-
ity. It is a language so understated that it seems
proof against unintentional ironies, a speech
fully armored by republican modesty for any
necessary raids on the heavenly palace. A milk
bottle, for instance, bearing a resemblance to the
jar in Tennessee, works up to transcedence from
just this deliberately prosy beginning:
... It’s funny,
I imagine I can actually remember one
certain
quart of milk which has just finished clinking
against three of its brethren
in the milkman’s great hand and stands,
freeing itself from itself, on the rotting
doorstep in Pawtucket circa 1932,
by one in whom time hasn’t completely
woven all its tangles, and not ever set
down....
The old bottle will shatter no one knows
when
in the decay of its music, the sea eagle
will cry itself back down into the sea
the sea’s creatures transfigure over and over.
Look. Everything has changed.
Ahead of us the meantime is overflowing.
Around us its own almost-invisibility
streams and sparkles over everything.
Whatever the language is doing, it still admits
the higher continuities. Ordinariness does not sig-
nal a rejection of significant subject, but gives
notice instead of Kinnell’s intention to broaden
the space of subject where that significance is to
be found. In the diction of this poetical discourse,
‘‘ordinary’’ means universal, means egalitarian.
But the ordinary also contains the time-
bound, and from within it, Kinnell advances
his central preoccupation: the conflict between
eternity and human death. Broadly shaping all
the new poems towards the elegiac, he takes
these lines from Petrarch as his epigraph:
‘‘moral beauty, acts, and words have put all
their burden on my soul.’’ In ‘‘There Are Things
I Tell To No One’’ (a distressingly coy title for
one of the more ambitious poems in the book),
he says:
I say ‘‘God’’; I believe,
rather, in a music of grace
that we hear, sometimes, playing to us
from the other side of happiness.
When we hear it, it flows
through our bodies, it lets us live
these days lighted by their vanity
worshipping—as the other animals do,
who live and die in the spirit
of the end—that backward-spreading
brightness.
The new book’s task is to understand that
‘‘backward-spreading brightness,’’ and to bal-
ance the longing heavenward against the down-
pulling anchor of earth’s subjects, and to be
determined to pay earth its measure of honor.
In 1972, in his essay ‘‘The Poetics of the
Physical World,’’ these intentions were phrased:
The subject of the poem is the thing which
dies.... Poetry is the wasted breath. This is
why it needs the imperfect music of the
human voice, this is why its words have no
higher aim than to press themselves to us, to
cling to the creatures and things we know and
love, to be the ragged garments. It is through
something radiant in our lives that we have
been able to dream of paradise, that we have
been able to invent the realm of eternity. But
there is another kind of glory in our lives which
derives precisely from our inability to enter that
paradise or to experience eternity. That we last
only for a time, that everyone around us lasts
only for a time, that we know this, radiates a
thrilling, tragic light on all our loves, all our
relationships, even on those moments when the
world, through its poetry, becomes almost
capable of spurning time and death.
As that ‘‘thrilling, tragic light’’ spreads over
the poems that deal directly with the death of
various people important to the poet—brother,
mother, and indirectly, the father—how do the
concessions made to poetry’s limited reach even-
tually affect the style of Kinnell’s tenderness to
earthborn subjects? Given the modest possibil-
ities enumerated here, the invention but not the
occupation of heaven, poetry’s ‘‘wasted breath,’’
how will the poet keep expressive faith in hisWHAT IS MOST APPEALING IN KINNELL’SNEW BOOK IS... A PERSONA THAT EXUDES HUMAN
WARMTH, A GENEROUS AND CARING SOUL.’’
Blackberry Eating