Three Books: Body Rags; Mortal Acts, Mortal Words; The Past

Three landmark collections capture Galway Kinnell’s reckoning with mortality, fatherhood, and the endurance of the natural world.

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.

Grounded in the landscapes of northern New England, the collection encompasses celebrated works like “The Bear” and “Saint Francis and the Sow,” moving from wilderness encounters to quiet domestic rituals in Sheffield, Vermont.

His verse captures the tangible textures of the physical world, observing everything from late-September blackberries to the flight of geese over the Connecticut Valley.

Kinnell has revised some of the poems for this new edition, and comments on his working method in a prefatory note.

• Nature Poetry: Visceral wilderness sequences like “The Porcupine” immerse the reader in the raw animal mind, tracking a wounded creature dragging through fields of goldenrod.
• Political Poetry: The ambitious multi-part sequence “The Last River” confronts racial injustice and civil rights struggles from inside a Louisiana jail cell.
• American Poetry: Evocative elegies commemorate fellow writers Richard Hugo on the Oregon coast and James Wright in Martin’s Ferry, grounding personal grief in specific American geography.
• Also by This Author: Collected Poems, The Book of Nightmares and A New Selected Poems.