Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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59 of 60 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Nightmares of rarely achieved love and beauty., June 24, 1998
Let me just say it straight out -- if you're interested in contemporary poetry, you oughta read, assimilate, live with this book. Galway Kinnell is a peerless master (now in his 70s and writing perhaps more beautifully than ever), and The Book of Nightmares is simply the most astonishing book-length poem created during the past 50 years of writing in English.That's a strong statement, maybe a little over my head (since I haven't read every volume of poetry published since 1950), but I've read quite a bit, and I know many poets and lovers of poetry who feel as strongly as I do about this work. Sounds gruesome -- The Book of Nightmares -- and it's true; Kinnell brings into this work the horror, anguish, brutality of 20th century history. Fierce imagery. Published in the early 70s, Nightmares reflects the social torment of the 60s -- the movement against the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement. Kinnell was a poet-activist against the war, and before that a field worker for the Congress of Racial Equality in the south, where he spent time in jail. His poetic recollection in Nightmares of a southern sheriff who booked and fingerprinted him is one of many remarkable moments, where precisely rendered physical detail resonates far beyond itself. A howl against the depravities of social injustice -- Nightmares is that and, at the same time even more, it is personal lyric poetry of aching beauty. It's hard to imagine any poet of any time writing a more lovely, tender poem father-to-daughter than "Little Sleep's Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight," part VII of the ten-part architecture of this book. The sense of coherence Kinnell creates from such a vastly disparate assemblage of materials, bringing it together in an almost demented, hallucinatory stew, is a marvel of craft. Images and ideas interweave throughout, like a musical theme and variations. The coherence, which can seem incoherent to a careless or inexperienced reader, is achieved through fierce intensity of voice, which ! works like a poetic super glue welding into the same amazing long poem: childbirth, a black bear tramping around a campfire in the rain, the frenzied death dance of a beheaded hen, a love affair in Iowa, Plato's concept of divided souls, the Holocaust, a Bach violin recital, the number 10, hair on the poet's back, fleas. Along with Ginsberg's "Howl", Kinnell carries Whitman forward and delivers him into the late 20th c. alive and kicking, and Nightmares is the work for Kinnell (who began in the 50s as a formalist in the style of Frost) where the long Whitmanic line takes off and soars. Enough. Kinnell wrote this book for his children, Maud and Fergus, and even if it is The Book of Nightmares it's poetry of rarely achieved love and beauty. -- Michael Schneider
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Impossible to praise highly enough, November 1, 2002
By A Customer
I was introduced to "The Book of Nightmares" many years ago in a modern poetry class. It was, and continues to be, a source of comfort and inspiration in my life, while other poetry from that period is forgotten. Through sheer beauty and force of language, nothing even comes close to it. Buy this and read it--it will enrich your life tremendously as only a book of truly great animus and spirituality can.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
For In That Sleep of Death, What Dreams May Come?, January 28, 2008
Some books you read once, then sell or give away, letting them fade from memory to make room for something better. Galway Kinnell's The Book of Nightmares is not one of these. Open this book, and you'll be drawn into a brooding world that won't let you go without a struggle.
On almost every page, you'll come across something noteworthy. Yes, as some have pointed out, there are a few words in each poem that require the use of a dictionary (or an alchemist's manual). But among the phrases that are immediately comprehensible, most stand out as having cogency and power. An example: In "The Call Across the Valley of Not-Knowing," a love poem interlaced with a primal urgency, Kinnell writes of the gaze of love, "I think I might have closed my eyes, and moved / from then on like the born blind, / their faces / gone into heaven already." Not only is the metaphor apt in this verse, describing the bliss of amorous attachment, but it illustrates the otherworldly tone that permeates the book.
Perhaps the most representative line in The Book of Nightmares is this one, from "The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible": "holding my head up with both hands I ran." Here we have the scream of a soul condemned to hell for simply being born, and just beginning to realize the extent of eternity. What is, in most of us, a fleeting feeling, and one to be avoided at all costs, in this book is extended into a minute study of darkness. Kinnell performs, as a colleague put it to me, as an autopsy surgeon dissecting the details of life. The effect is chilling.
Disparate claims have been made regarding the earthly subject matter of Kinnell's poems, but to me, whether the impetus happens to be the poet's children, the war that was on in Viet Nam, or the literal moldering bones of dead lovers being eaten by demons, the poems speak in a language of base urges and lofty desires. The verses leap from details like a woman's pregnant belly in the firelight to unspoken and unspeakable fears, the nightmares of the book's title.
I hesitate to describe any work of literature as `timeless,' but if I were allowed one use of the term this year, it would be for this book. In the decades since its publication, much has changed. We now have the world at our fingertips. Communism and the Iron Curtain have fallen. It's now normal to rely on prescription drugs for one's well-being, even at a young age. But what's the same is this: We still dream. As Kinnell's work reminds us, that also means that we still wake up, sometimes from places so dark as to shake us to our souls. For a poet to document these places, as he has done here, is, in a word, remarkable.
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