Book Description
This newly assembled volume draws from two books that were originally published in Galway Kinnell's first two decades of writing, WHAT A KINGDOM IT WAS (1960), which included the poem "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World," and FLOWER HERDING ON MOUNT MONADNOCK (1964). Kinnell has revised some of the work in this new edition, and comments on his working method in a prefatory note.

About the Author
Galway Kinnell is a former MacArthur Fellow and has been state poet of Vermont. In 1982 his Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He teaches at New York University, where he is the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing. For thirty-five years-from WHAT A

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock1I can support it no longer.Laughing ruefully at myselfFor all I claim to have sufferedI get up. Damned nightmarer!It is New Hampshire out here,It is nearly the dawn.The song of the whippoorwill stopsAnd the dimension of depth seizes everything.2The whistlings of a peabody bird go overheadLike a needle pushed five times through the air,They enter the leaves, and come out little changed.The air is so stillThat as they go off through the treesThe love songs of birds do not get any fainter.3The last memory I haveIs of a flower that cannot be touched,Through the bloom of which, all day,Fly crazed, missing bees.4As I climb sweat gets up my nostrils,For an instant I think I am at the sea,One summer off Cap Ferrat we watched a black seagullStraining for the dawn, we stood in the surf,Grasshoppers splash up where I step,The mountain laurel crashes at my thighs.5There is something joyous in the elegiesOf birds. They seemCaught up in a formal delight,Though the mourning dove whistles of despair.But at last in the thousand elegiesThe dead rise in our hearts,On the brink of our happiness we stopLike someone on a drunk starting to weep.6I kneel at a pool,I look through my faceAt the bacteria I thinkI see crawling through the moss.My face sees me,The water stirs, the face,Looking preoccupied,Gets knocked from its bones.7I weighed eleven poundsAt birth, having stayed onTwo extra weeks in the womb.Tempted by room and fresh airI came out big as a policeman,Blue-faced, with narrow red eyes.It was eight days before the doctorWould scare my mother with me.Turning and craning in the vinesI can make out through the leavesThe old, shimmering nothingness, the sky.8Green, scaly moosewoods ascend,Tenants of the shaken paradise,At every wind last night"s rainComes splattering from the leaves,It drops in flurries and lies there,The footsteps of some running start.9From a rockA waterfall,A single trickle like a strand of wire,Breaks into beads halfway down.I knowThe birds fly offBut the hug of the earth wrapsWith moss their graves and the giant boulders.10In the forest I discover a flower.The invisible life of the thingGoes up in flames that are invisible,Like cellophane burning in the sunlight.It burns up. Its drift is to be nothing.In its covertness it has a wayOf uttering itself in place of itself,Its blossoms claim to float in the Empyrean,A wrathful presence on the blur of the ground.The appeal to heaven breaks off.The petals begin to fall, in self-forgiveness.It is a flower. On this mountainside it is dying.Copyright 1953, 1954, © 1955, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1963, 1964,1970, 1971, 1974, 2002 by Galway Kinnell. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

FROM THE PUBLISHER