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FLOWER-HERDING ON MOUNT MONADNOCK by Galway Kinnell

FLOWER-HERDING ON MOUNT MONADNOCK

By

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

In the last few years a new sort of meditatively masculine poetry has come on the scene: virile and vigorously subjective yet always anti-romantic, sometimes in free verse, sometimes in stanzaic or syllabic patterns, all very much strong songs of experience. However ""existential"", they still communicate a hard-won exhilaration, a ort of honest joy, all the more enriching in that the light that shines through shines t of knowledge of the dark. Among the best of that breed (others are Allan Dugan, ack Gilbert, Edward Field) is Galway Kinnell; his second volume is an impressive follow-up to his immensely impressive What A Kingdom It Was. At times almost tender in one, less flashy, less fierce in style, the new poems divide between scenes of the city, of NY, Calcutta, Kyoto, and scenes of the seasons, of mountains, trees, the sea, flowers. But all bespeak the human condition, of a man experiencing the world to experience himself, of a consciousness searching out the things which are his own and the things which ring him to others, to people and places, to wry understandings, to compassionate perceptions. The eulogy for Robert Frost, the title poem, and the opening one are pure innell: humane, clear, chivalric. Kinnell could become that rara avis: a noble yet fully modern poet.