Galway Kinnell, "who was recognized with both a Pulitzer Prize and an American Book Award for a body of poetry that pushed deep into the heart of human experience in the decades after World War II," died Tuesday, the New York Times reported. He was 87. His many books include Selected Poems, The Book of Nightmares and When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone.
A former Vermont Poet Laureate, "Galway wasn't afraid to explore the full range of emotion in his poems," Major Jackson, poet and University of Vermont professor, told the Burlington Free Press. "He expressed terror, he expresses profound awe at human existence, and regret. You can hear all of it in his work. It would be limiting for us to confine him merely as a protest poet or a poet of the heart or a Romantic poet. Maybe that's part of his allure, that he captures the full range of human emotions."
From his poem "Another Night in the Ruins":
How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren't, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames?
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