The Book of Nightmares

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 actual

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.

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