It is 20 years now since Galway Kinnell published his first book of poems, "What a Kingdom It Was." The glory of that volume was a long poem, "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ Into the New World," an overtly Whitmanian celebration and lament that remains one of the major American visions of New York City. Rereading it alongside Mr. Kinnell's new book confirms the sense I remember experiencing two decades ago, that here was another phantasmagoria of the city worthy of its ancestry, in that line that goes from Poe's "The City in the Sea" through Whitman on to its culmination in Hart Crane's "The Bridge." Galway Kinnell had made a magnificent beginning, and held a remarkable promise.

Whether his subsequent work as yet has vindicated that promise is problematic, though there have been very good poems in all of his books, including his new "Mortal Acts...