book is ‘‘nothing but an effort to face death and
live with death,’’ Kinnell goes on to describe
the special connection that infants have to
transcendence:
These little lumps of clinging flesh, and one’s
terrible, inexplicable closeness to them, make
one feel very strongly the fragility of a person.
In the company of babies, one is very close to
the kingdom of death. And as children grow so
quickly, as they change almost from day to day,
it’s hardly possible to put mortality out of mind
for long.
Approximately eight years after saying this,
Kinnell’s concern with babies as emblem of the
human link to death has altered, and broadened
to stress generational and familial continuity. The
focus on eternal co-presence is returned earthside;
out Kinnell’s way, however, parenting is mostly
something that fathers do by themselves.
Up toThe Book of Nightmaresand includ-
ing all of the previous work, Kinnell’s personae
live comfortably within the American macho:
boy, tramp, convict, logger, skier and hiker—
these solitary speakers wander quite naturally
and without any sense of excluded life. If in
poems about parenting Kinnell later becomes
the celebrant of domesticity, it is certainly not
that he does so after having served a term as the
poet of marriage. The adult female, abstractly
celebrated as a featureless sexual partner, is only
fleetingly invoked as part of Kinnell’s cosmos.
(An early exception to this is the vivid little poem
dedicated to Denise Levertov, reading her
poetry.) If in the new book we are slowly work-
ing up to a family romance, it is still a romance
where most of the parts are played by men.
In the work of some poets, it would be easy
to construct an argument defending this prac-
tice. As many worlds exist that can legitimately
be characterized by the acute absence of either
sex, it seems fruitless to demand equal time at all
times. But Kinnell suggests a poetics yoking
physical and imaginative creativity, and fusing
poems and human generations within a single
energy source. If mothers, wives and daughters
are obliterated, except for equivocal traces,
within this set-up, Kinnell invites the return of
the repressed in significant lapses in the story;
important gaps, and because of the gaps, distor-
tions. You can’t take on children, parents and
the family without installing the ladies some-
where. From the recent book, the short poem
‘‘Saint Francis and the Snow,’’ moves to fill this
absence, as the sow is lifted into the series of
animal totems including porcupine and bear. In
the poem, the speaker firmly tells the mama pig
the old story of her beauty:... Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in
touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick
length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual
curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the
spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and
shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen
mouths sucking and blowing beneath
them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
But Saint Francis may be casting out more
than the poet bargains for, as this poem appears
to transform mother dread, or a potentially fear-
some and devil-ridden sow into a nurturant, if
phallically lengthy, ‘‘perfect loveliness.’’
Kinnell has elsewhere pleaded for a poetics
that will be personally inclusive. In ‘‘Poetry, Per-
sonality and Death’’ he says:
If we take seriously Thoreau’s dictum, ‘‘Be it
life or death, we crave only reality,’’ if we are
willing to face the worst in ourselves, we also
have to accept the risks I have mentioned, that
probing into one’s own wretchedness one may
just dig up more wretchedness. What justifies
the risk is the hope that in the end the search
may open and transfigure us.
What is most appealing in Kinnell’s new
book is not wretchedness, but a persona that
exudes human warmth, a generous and caring
soul. What creates the dilemma of sentimental-
ity, though, is exactly what charm excludes: that
core of faith in language’s ability to reflect
directly on the relation of men and women, in
the minute particulars of what is to constitute, in
Kinnell’s phrase fromThe Book Of Nightmares,
‘‘tenderness to existence.’’....
InThe Book of Nightmares,both daughter
and son, Maud and Fergus, become emblems of
continuity; but in the new book the son becomes
the emblem of the on-going continuity of father
generations. While it is true that people, even
Blackberry Eating