Galway Kinnell's poetry has always been marked by richness of language, devotion to the things and creatures of the world, and an effort to transform every understanding into the universality of art.

German poet Rainer Maria Rilke(1875-1926) enjoys ever-increasing popularity. His Duino Elegies is considered on of the greatest long poems of the twentieth century. Yet translations from his native German have always presented challenges: the elusiveness of Rilke's imagery, the playful way he both distorts and subverts his own language, and the depth and complexity of his poetry make it difficult for translators to preserve the beauty and meaning of the original text. In his stunning bilingual selection that includes the entire Duino Elegies as well as a number of favorite and less familiar shorter poems, Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann manage to retain power and grace of Rilke's words. Throughout his poetry, Rilke addresses questions of how to live in and relate to a world in a voice that is simultaneoulsy prophetic and intensely personel. These translations offer new insight into this enigmatic German poet whose work will continue to be read and admired throughout the world.

The life's work of one of the true master poets of his generation,* whose poetry helped shape the consciousness of an age

For Galway Kinnell, it was the poet's job to figure out what's happening within oneself, to figure out the connection between the self and the world, and to get it down in words that have a lasting shape, that have a chance of lasting. This comprehensive volume includes The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World, Kinnell's stunning poem of immigrant life on the Lower East Side of New York, the incantatory book-length poem The Book of Nightmares, the searing evocation of Hiroshima in The Fundamental Project of Technology, the iconic themes of his middle years--eros, family, the natural world (After Making Love We Hear Footsteps, The Bear, Saint Francis and the Sow, Blackberry Eating)--and the unflinchingly introspective work of his later years. Spanning six decades, this is the essential collection for old and new devotees of a poet of the rarest ability . . . who can flesh out music, raise the spirits, and break the heart.**

*New York Times
**Boston Globe

I will go back to that silent evening when we lay together and talked in silent voices, while outside slow lumps of soft snow fell, hushing as they got near the ground, with a fire in the room, in which centuries of tree went up in continuous ghost-giving-up, without a crackle, into morning light.
Not until what hastens went slower did we sleep.
When we got home we turned and looked back at our tracks twining out of the woods, where the branches we brushed against let fall puffs of sparkling snow, quickly, in silence, like stolen kisses, and where the scritch scritch scritch among the trees, which is the sound that dies inside the sparks from the wedge when the sledge hits it off center telling everything inside it is fire, jumped to a black branch, puffed up but without arms and so to our eyes lonesome, and yet also--how can we know this?--happy!
in shape of chickadee. Lying still in snow, not iron-willed, like railroad tracks, willing not to meet until heaven, but here and there treading slubby kissing stops, our tracks wobble across the snow their long scratch.
So many things that happen here are really little more, if even that, than a scratch, too. Words, in our mouths, are almost ready, already, to bandage the one whom the scritch scritch scritch, meaning if how when we might lose each other, scratches scratches scratches from this moment to that. Then I will go back to that silent evening, when the past just managed to overlap the future, if only by a trace, and the light doubles and casts through the dark a sparkling that heavens the earth.

This volume brings together BODY RAGS and MORTAL ACTS, MORTAL WORDS and THE PAST, three books that are central to the life's work of one of the masters of contemporary poetry. Included here are many of Galway Kinnell's best-loved and most anthologized poems. Kinnell has revised some of the poems for this new edition, and comments on his working method in a prefatory note.

Galway Kinnell's twelfth book of poems is powerful and thrilling. Imperfect Thirst includes beautiful love poems and approaches elemental subjects with a remarkable balance of good nature and holy dread: recollections of childhood, snapshots of impassive cruelty, reflections on art and nature. This energetic collection will prove once again why Galway Kinnell is one of America's masters of the art.

Here in paperback is the celebrated eleventh book of poems by Galway Kinnell. The book's title derives from Walt Whitman's Last Invocation Strong is your hold O mortal flesh, / Strong is your hold O love. In this striking collection, Kinnell gives us poems of intermingling with the natural world, love poems and evocations of sexuality, poems about his father, his children, poet friends, poet heroes, and mythic figures. Included also is When the Towers Fell, his stunning requiem for those who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11.

Galway Kinnell combines his gift for precise imagery with a storyteller's skill in this journey across the Iranian desert--away from the fragile self-righteous virtues of adopted moral tradition, into the disorder and sexual confusion of agonizing self-knowledge. First published in 1966 by Houghton Mifflin, this extensively revised paperback edition of Black Light brings a distinguished novel back into print.

When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone is a poem that invites us, too, to pay such keen attention--both by seeing and listening--to the world, while also paying respect to our own inner lives, our feelings of solitude or self-estrangement, our longings and obligations to each other.--Jennifer Grotz

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.