[Some] 10 years ago, I witnessed a poetry reading so charged with high emotion and bardic intensity it left me both excited and exhausted…. [Galway Kinnell], scarcely looking down at the page, had chanted his way through the whole of "The Book of Nightmares," his book-length Rilkean sequence that remains one of the most ambitious works in contemporary poetry. This book, which exemplified Mr. Kinnell's belief that it is "the dream of every poem to be a myth," used material from his own life, such as the birth of his children, in ways that transcended autobiography and seemed to confront directly the rhythms of existence from birth to death. Especially as read aloud in one fell swoop, the poem gave powerful expression to the hopes and fears of a parent, husband and lover adrift in his own sense of mortality.

Later I came to feel that this remarkable book...