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The Book of Nightmares

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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

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.

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.

30 years ago I walked into a bookstore near the college where I was taking a poetry class and asked for some help finding a poem to dissect for my final project. The owner, a self-professed alcoholic, unrelated to the bookstore's founder but having the identical last name (Allen), pulled out an old literary newspaper with a review of "The Book of Nightmares" in it. "I don't usually do this, but for ol' Gal' ..." he said, and tore the review from the newspaper and handed it to me. (I still have it.) He described this book to me as "the finest work of modern poetry that exists." Swayed as I was by superlatives, I purchased the book, took it home, chose "The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible" (VI) and went to work.

I got an A on my presentation, of course. I worked my butt off dissecting every line, looking up every word, interpreting every metaphor, reveling in the precision of language and intensity of emotions. My teacher had described poetry as "emotionalized experience", and this book epitomizes that notion.

"Incorruptible" begins with the image of a corpse in a battlefield, and through this corpse Kinnell expresses his outrage at the wrongs of our civilization, tempered by an abiding hope in the power of good to overcome evil. That is part of the genius of this work - through the most horrific images Kinnell repeatedly returns to the same theme of redemption: "Lieutenant!/This corpse will not stop burning!"

His indictment of Western civilization in the middle of the poem is amazingly apt, and burned so deeply into my psyche that it influenced my views toward Christianity, politics, and violence for the rest of my life. One of the most intense images to leap out at me was near the end of "Incorruptible", where the corpse's memory speaks of his final moments on the battlefield: "I ran/my neck broken I ran/holding my head up with both hands I ran/thinking the flames/the flames may burn the oboe/but listen buddy boy they can't touch the notes!" Combining these vivid images with the repeated refrain, "Lieutenant!/This corpse will not stop burning!" Kinnell concisely and masterfully sums up the relationship between the undying music of the soul and the oboe as ephemeral flesh. I was smitten. The oboe had long been one of my favorite instruments. How could anyone have found such a gorgeous metaphor? And so it progressed.

Through the years I have dissected most of the rest of the book in the same way I did "Incorruptible". I agree with an earlier writer that "Little Sleep's Head" is one of the most moving tributes of a father's love one might imagine. Every time I read from this book I shed tears. I have quoted so many times from "Nightmares": simple lines like, "... and for her/whose face/I held in my hands/a few hours, whom I gave back/only to keep holding the space where she was, ..." and his classic paraphrase of Aristophanes: "... each of us/is a torn half/whose lost other we keep seeking across time/until we die, or give up - /or actually find her ..." as he goes on to describe a profoundly common emotional interlude. I could identify with so many of these lines!

I have read much of Kinnell's work in the past 30 years. I own most, if not all, of his books of poetry. A few years ago I became a math teacher and became so engrossed in my work that his poems sat on the shelf for too long. Then one day I was at an airport, purchased a New Yorker magazine, and lo & behold, a brand new epic poem by Kinnell, "When the Towers Fell", unfolded in front of me. It is a moving tribute to September 11, to America, and to our strength as a people.

I always wanted to meet the man, shake his hand, describe, as well as I may be able at the time, how deeply the passion revealed in his lines influenced me throughout my life. I wanted to thank him for his gifts, as a son would thank a father for teaching him to be a good person. For a year I lived near Kinnell's home in northern Vermont; I spoke with a colleague who attended Kinnell's readings a few times, and wished I could have done so too. And then I found a website with a video of Kinnell reading "Wait", another favorite (http://openvault.wgbh.org/ntw/MLA000008/index.html) and finally got my chance to hear the rich baritone voice evoking the same tenderness and beauty I had grown so accustomed to through years of reading his lines. I felt I was listening to an old and dear friend. After all I had accompanied the author through various romances, the loss of those close to him, the birth of his daughter & son, the intimate moments of their childhood. Through the gift of his poetry I had experienced these things exactly as his few close friends and family members would have done - on the deepest emotional level.

Perhaps as you read this you might wonder about the abundance of praise I express, or maybe you feel Kinnell's work has lost its relevance in a postmodern world. At this point I hope I am speaking to the young people I have taught for the past ten years: this book is a genuine classic. While you may read that this work was the result of the author's activism as a Vietnam War protester or a civil rights worker - yes, those were the roots from which the writing grew - the images and emotions evoked in this book are timeless. Is there really a difference between Vietnam and Iraq, between the civil rights movement of 1965 and class warfare today? Do the feelings attached to romance, childbirth and loss ever change? And while poetry is supposed to know its place in the scope of literary endeavors and not try to preach or teach, I can't begin to describe how profoundly this work has shaped my views as an adult. This is a very powerful piece of literature, and will remain so for many years to come.

So please, spend a few dollars as I did 30 years ago, bring this book home, dive into it with dictionary.com, a cup of tea, and maybe some quiet music, and experience the transformative power these words still possess. You will not regret your expenditure in money, time, or emotions.

And if you should ever happen across the author, please tell him thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

Thomas L. Mischler

I first read THE BOOK OF NIGHTMARES when I was a young, unformed poet and author of Twenty, and it moved me to tears from the opening lines. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then I flattered Galway Kinnell, poorly and in my own idiom, in my collection HIDDEN STONES (long unavailable, I sometimes regret). I must have pored over "Under The Maud Moon" and the other works in this cycle of poems many hundreds of times, marvelling at his voice and his ability to cast both shadow and light with a turn of phrase or a word. Rereading this at age Fifty, I am still moved by THE BOOK OF NIGHTMARES.

And his poetry only matured with time. "Das werk lobt den Meister." This is a Master's Work.

The Book of Nightmares: Order through Universal Memory in Chaos



Galway Kinnell, in his book "The Book of Nightmares," has various esoteric themes that bleed into each other. It is difficult to think of any one theme as separate from some of the others. This paper will address his use of spheres, cycles, swirls, and whorls colliding into chaos, the absurdity of life, and the joy of finding unity through universal memory.

The first chapter, "Under the Maud Moon," which is in itself a sphere, he portrays the cyclical nature of life in his various stanzas. He discusses an "oath... between ... flesh and spirit [being] ... broken ... over and over." This might be a question asking why life, and why death. He writes of the birth of one "who begins the passage ... to take hold of [her father's] song." The bellybutton is mentioned to refer to our connections with mother before mother as cyclical and unbroken. He also directs our attention to the high death/life contrast in "The Hen Flower" chapter as a hen is killed and produces and orb "its globe of golden earth ... skid[ing] forth, ridding her even of the life to come."

In his fourth chapter he inserts a letter from his loved one Virginia that describes her subconscious drawing of circles, figure-eights, and mandalas--symbols of infinity. This was apparently quite disturbing to her as she discovered that her demon lover was her own self as its whisper "forced itself through her teeth" and said, "Virginia, your eyes shine back to me from my own world." She was finding herself in the chaos at the edge of consciousness. Our "hands, moving on [their] own down the curving path... drawn by the ... terrible lure of vacuum" begins to address the idea of "self-transcendence and "self-dissolution" as described by Ken Wilbur in his book "A Brief History of Everything." In it he describes "the pattern that connects" and several tenets. The first tenet is that reality is comprised of whole/parts, or "holons" which is an entity that is itself a whole and simultaneously a part of some other whole. This concept lends itself to the tenet that the holons have two drives which is to maintain both wholeness and partness. Individuals, as holons, want to maintain our individuality at the same time that we aspire to transcend ourselves. This "terrible lure of vacuum" is death, self-dissolution, self-transcendence. It is only through death of either our physical bodies or through enlightenment or awareness that we can accomplish this progression.

It is in our struggle and confusion that we find ourselves in a state of chaos. In "The Holographic Paradigm" edited by Ken Wilbur, and in an article submitted by Stanford Neuroscientist Karl Pribram, the Biologist Lyall Watson writes of pebbles as they drop into ponds. If two pebbles are dropped, and each produces crests, the crests will coincide and cancel each other out and produce an isolated patch of calm water. All combinations of the two occur, and the resulting complex arrangement of ripples is an interference pattern. Each thought, each individual, each holon, could be producing an infinite number of ripples in our collective deep-seated conscious and unconscious memories. In chapter nine, "The Path Among the Stones," Kinnell describes an interference pattern:

And the agates knocked

From circles scratched into the dust

With the click

Of a wishbone breaking, inward-swirling

Globes biopsied out of sunsets never to open again,



And that wafer-stone

Which skipped ten times across

The water, suddenly starting to run as it went under,

And the zeroes it left

That met

And passed into each other, they themselves

Smoothing themselves from the water ...



Agates are often striped, and can create complex patterns in dust. When they are knocked from their temporary resting places, it's a sort of death, like the "wishbone of a hen breaking." The wafer-stone creates patterns in the water as it skips across, and the result is an interference that eventually cancels itself out. Note that Kinnell uses "circles" in the first stanza and "zeroes" in the second.

Kinnell frequently alludes to comlex patterns of life like the water ripples by using footsteps, fingerprints, paths, flights, constellations, songs, music, waves of sexual desire, rippled beaches, funeral shells, conches, echoing from Cliffside, kneel-prints "on the scorched earth in the shapes of men and animals," and probably much more not cited here. As these patterns are discussed, Kinnell approaches the concept of chaos.

The footsteps in chapter three deals extensively with the shoes of someone who has passed on and the history of "someone else's wandering." He mentions advice from a Crone that "the first step...shall be to lose the way." The foot path leads in patterns of chaos. In chapter eight, his fingerprint is taken in a Southern jail by "the almost loving, animal gentleness of [The Sheriff's] hand." The Sheriff is mentioned as knowing "hell...with...desires undiminished." In chapter nine, the path winds "toward the high valley of waterfalls," "ghost-bloom[s] into the starlight, to float out over the trees." In chapter two, he writes of the "huge broken letters" of the "cosmos spelling itself, ...shuddering across the black sky and vanishing." In chapter one, he writes of the song from a "love-note twisting ... curving off, into a howl." Chapter eight describes genitals "sen[ding] out wave after wave of holy desire... the unicorn's phallus could have risen, ... out of thought itself." Rippled beaches, shells, and conches are described in chapter nine, and the echoing cliffside is described in chapter ten "where the voice calling from stone no longer answers." Again, the sound waves get canceled out.

In chapter nine, Kinnell describes finding himself "alive in the whorled archway of the fingerprint of all things." It can be discouraging to discover the angst of being alone and yet being so much a part of the rest of the universe. Our "hands moving on its own down the curving path ... by the terror and terrible lure of vacuum." It sometimes seems absurd. "...this the nightmare you wake screaming from: being forever in the pre-trembling of a house that falls."

And is it

The hen's nightmare, or her secret dream,

To scratch the ground forever

Eating the minutes out of the grains of sand?

And so, "between answer and nothing" do we desire to put ourselves in the mundane monotony of existence or is that what we fear? This is, as Kinnell describes in chapter nine, "the bear call ... like ours ... needing to be answered." It is our naturwe to question, to try to figure out this thing called life, and to fight with mortality. Perhaps we, like the great wanderers as in chapter three, "who lighted their steps by the lamp of pure hunger and pure thirst," will find that "whichever way [we] lurched was the way."

Can we find consolation in the absurdity of life somehow? We have the beauty of birth--the "celestial cheesiness" of our children. The stories and "final postcards to posterity" of our ancestors and the paths that were worn by a previous shoe-owner. We have each other. "The self is the least of it. Let our scars fall in love." Let us have "Tenderness toward Existence."

Let us not commit "the error of thinking, one day this will only be memory." Let us live in the moment, because now is all that we have. Perhaps we can find joy through uniting in relationship. Maybe it is that "all bodies, one body, one light [could be] made of everyone's darkness together."

Water is a symbol for deep seated emotions such as conflicts and phobias. I think it was very appropriate that at one point in the book Kinnell used a water ripping analogy to describe our angst. Can our interference patterns join to "pass each other ... smoothing themselves from the water" through empathy and love? Can we experience joy and self-healing by comforting others as "broken arms heal themselves?" and by truly letting ourselves meld with each other in our human experience? The only prints we leave behind are our progeny and our accomplishments. They too will eventually die. But, we will not have lived in vain if we can somehow make an impact on someone else's life.

In chapter ten, Kinnell has "one" and "zero" walk off with each other, "one creature walking away side by side with the emptiness." Like a wave colliding with another, the 1 is canceled out by the inference pattern of the 0. He says that "lastness is brightness. It is the brightness gathered up of all that went before." Like a vivid and stark sunset, we die in an amalgam of all of our experiences. As we unite with death or transcend the self, our own existence cycles forth. "...the dead lie, empty, filled, at the beginning, and the first voice comes craving again out of their mouths." From death comes life. "The bow-hairs ... of the back-alleys and blood strings we have lived | still crying | still singing, from the sliced intestine | of cat." We have life now and are to find meaning, what is good, a sense of humor, and to laugh into the absurdity.

I realize this book of poetry was composed within a politically volatile atmosphere I cannot possibly appreciate. Someone of my generation might only imagine the impact of a world teetering on the brink--the revolutionary spirit and catastrophic implications of wars, drafts, social liberalization, civil rights, women's rights--so many dramatic failures of politicians who would be king, and so many magnificent sacrifices standing between the looming eyes of Big Brother and the creative abyss.

To speak honestly in today's world is both more and less possible: one says 'I believe this to be true'--and the freedom of speech seems to have moved from legal theory to cultural practice. And yet to speak, to be heard, is also to invite all manner of criticism, to put one's professional life and livelihood at risk. As poetry in the US has unfortunately faced a number of obstacles, I consider myself so very lucky to have been introduced to some of the most amazing works during my undergrad years at UVA--and my exposure to Kinnell's 'Book of Nightmares' remains one of the most stunning and graphic works of poetry I have yet to stumble over, fall into, relish, devour and be devoured.

This might reek of some sappy rhetorical flourish, but reading this particular piece of Kinnell's work for the first time ten years ago was akin to listening to Mozart's Requiem or Schubert's Death and the Maiden or Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez for the first time... I found myself bewildered, overwhelmed, and seduced--as if to taste something otherworldly, and yet somehow made me feel more at home with myself. Kinnell's 'Book of Nightmares' blurs the lines between so many realms; Kinnell speaks of love in such a cunning, terrible, compassionate way it is as if his words could stir the most tortured heart to life--as does he describe the fears and manifest devotion of a father to his children, reading through certain passages--even amid their vivid and monstrous nature--one reads with the gentle eyes of a father cupping his child's face, just before turning off the light.

'The Book of Nightmares' was a gift from my senior thesis advisor in my dearly missed Philosophy department at UVA. Little did I know that at that very moment, I had begun my descent into a work of art--a world of nightmares all too familiar--that would always be within arm's reach of my desk. At the final stages of completing a dissertation on Indian secular nationalism, I realized early on 'poetry' was not considered 'rigorous work'--a big no-no for political scientists.

How easily we forget what compells us, what inspires the brain to fit and start, the heart to leap: if it had not been for poetry, for the Kinnells and Pessoas and Plaths and Khayyams and Kabirs and Tagores of the universe--there is no doubt in my mind that I would have never survived a Ph.D. program.

Kinnell's 'Book of Nightmares' is not merely a sound selection for a random university book report assignment: this is that very rare and precious species of poetry that you will pick up 5, 10, 20 years from now--decade after decade--and always find some new twist or turn of phrase that makes you catch your breath. Even though I personally enjoy a decent nightmare on occassion and probably do not want children--even though so much of this book speaks of things I will never live to endure or enjoy--I swear that it seems one cannot help come out the other side feeling strangely... more human.

Lastly, I should add that this text is one of the few that stands as a testament to what Martin Heidegger (momentarily ignoring his Nazi sympathies) declared in his provocative essay, 'The Origin of the Work of Art'.

"The nature of poetry is the founding of truth..."

"To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy."

Galway Kinnell's 'The Book of Nightmares' is a book of poetry one reads only to wonder who they could have possibly been before reading it.

In conclusion, two big thumbs up. Now back to the dissertation.

The Book of Nightmares by Galway Kinnell was an overall well written book of poems. He encounters the idea of death and that every moment while you are alive you are dying. He discusses the idea of death, but when his children are born a new concern is created. The entire book is dedicated to his children and he gives different life lessons in each poem. Kinnell connects with the audience because this is a common concern for many people. There is also sympathy when he is speaking to his children because he doesn't want them to think the way he did. Kinnell brilliantly puts together this book with poems of war, infidelity, love, and fear with a great detail of imagery to create this masterpiece!