Imperfect Thirst
Kinnell (When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone) launches his 12th book of poetry with a witty poem dedicated to "The Pen"-a pen which, "like the person who gets out of the truck, goes/ around to the rear, signals to the driver, and calls, 'C'mon/ back.'" After that beginning, nearly anyone would follow this writer into the past to his quiet father who "bent down out of the gloom like a god," and later, in another poem, step happily into an imagined future near "the idea of paradise." Kinnell's breadth in the volume astonishes: poems range from an expression of poetic resistance to the fashionable scholarly disinterment of language in "The Deconstruction of Emily Dickinson," to the delicate tableau he creates of a woman caring for her father in "Parkinson's Disease," to his gleefully erudite tribute to excrement in "Holy Shit." Primal themes-love, nature, mortality-emerge in newly compelling forms. In "Rapture," for example, conventional poetic language is abandoned for sensuality's purer rhythms: "Simile is useless." Though at times Kinnell's remarks to himself seem needlessly self-referential, when the poet speaks intimately to us, his voice is unsurpassable.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.