The Past - Softcover

In the wry title poem, Kinnell paints a Magritte-like portrait of the poet as middle-aged, indefatigable truth-seeker: "A chair under one arm/ a desktop under the other,/ the same Smith-Corona/ on my back I even now batter/words into visibility with." In another haunting lyric he conjures up "cemetery angels" hovering over graves of the dead "who will erupt into flower." But Kinnell knows that we are mortal, our existence a mote in God's eye ("A snap of the sea and a third of a century/ passes)." Like Matthew Arnold, he reels at our aloneness in the universe, as in this description of a moonlit ocean: "The tiny glitters all together make one wide path . . . / On shore the rocks wait, very still, for night to end." Through an act of imagination the poet glimpses "what sleep would be like if one were happy." Ranging from lyrics on rustic Vermont living to dark odes on Hiroshima, this is a strong collection, Kinnell's first since his Selected Poems (1982) won a Pulitzer Prize. November
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Kinnell opens The Past with moving evocations of his life in Sheffield, Ver mont some 30 years ago. But his real subject is the eerie passage of time which, like ``the pay phone at the aban doned/ filling station . . . rang, off and on, an entire day.'' Time is the ``me- here-it-gone'' paradox of our daily lives, containing ``all the elsewheres, so far away, where children cry . . . .'' Time is acutely real for lovers, trying to prolong their bliss in a moment of deja- prevu , ``the already-memory of what has just happened.'' Time, finally, im plies death, as Kinnell recognizes in poignant elegies for Richard Hugo and James Wright. Readers will join him in asserting, on the final page, ``I have al ways intended to live forever,/ but even more, to live now.'' A major book by a major poet, highly recommend ed. Daniel L. Guillory, English Dept., Millikin University, Decatur, Ill.
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.