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SELECTED POEMS by Galway Kinnell,
176pp, £9.95, Bloodaxe
MAX IS MISSING by Peter Porter,
76pp, £7.99, Picador

Bloodaxe continue to promote writers new to these shores and the respected American poet Galway Kinnell is the latest beneficiary with this substantial selection, which draws on eight collections from 1960 to 1994. The earlier work reprinted here begins fairly formally: ‘For William Carlos Williams’, for example, which dates from What a Kingdom it Was, his 1960 volume, is traditional and fairly buttoned-up. Soon, however, Kinnell is trying his hand at experimental concrete sound effects and even prose-poetry in a quietist Waldenesque meditation which forms part of a sequence called ‘Middle of the Way, dating from 1964.

Whitman and Robert Frost seem to be his tutelary spirits in much of the 1960s work, and this is the period of Kinnell’s poetry which convinces me most. The snowy encounters with the natural world seem authentic and felt: ‘I live half alive in the world, / half my life belongs to the wild darkness’, as he writes, again from ‘Middle of the Way’.

Later work is mostly unbroken, free verse meditations on the self, but much of it, even the 1994 Imperfect Thirst, seems to try too hard and contain many bare, unadorned lines. An interesting writer, but it’s hard to see why Kinnell has been lauded with the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award: give me the absurd flights of Berryman or the sidereal Appalachian meditations of Charles Wright any day. Kinnell’s later work seems to disperse itself in the urge to embrace experience.

Peter Porter’s latest book, on the other hand, exhibits an intellectual toughness and ease amongst varied forms of writing which is entirely at odds with Kinnell’s work. Porter can move swiftly from deceptive Audenesque light verse to serious musings on existence to Spoonerisms, even to rewriting ‘The Hound of Heaven’ to include threatening Conan Doyle clues: ‘The Baskerville-shaped shadows cross the floor.’ This is a highly varied volume in terms of subject matter, yet everywhere is a sense of complete conviction and a restless mind at work.

Several poems here hint at last glances at classical verities and passages of experience throughout Porter’s life, and these are amongst the most affecting and moving ones in the volume: ‘The Lost Watch’ locates regret in a domestic scenario with grandchildren, then moves gracefully to conclude with ‘time and time’s measurers encircled by the waves.’ Elsewhere, in other poems, these waves wash with altered DNA and Julie Burchill!

In places, however, one detects a certain conservatism breaking through: ‘The Sweet Slow Inbreak of Angels’ surveys the creations of the Italian renaissance, the visions of Victorian poets and then descends, lamenting our lack of the numinous, to a conclusion which leaves us with ‘obliquities by Paul Muldoon.’ Similarly, ‘So Unimaginably Different and So Long Ago’ namechecks Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst and wonders ‘how taste can run backwards?’ There is nothing gratuitously oblique or backward-looking about this volume: it wears the mantle of ‘late work’ (Porter’s words) easily, and moves with appropriate seriousness throughout.