Galway Kinnell's career gives the impression of continuity despite his transformations of style and tone, perhaps because he has held fast to a certain idea of the possibilities of poetry. Throughout his career he has minded his matter first, in the faith that feeling sincerely will produce words adequate to experience, and has seemed pretty much content to cast his material in the received style of the day. Kinnell addresses the great and eternal themes in a contemporary idiom, convinced, it seems, that familiar emotions need only be rephrased with passion to be made new.

The poems in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words partake of the autumnal mellowness that now threatens to become the standard for the poets of Kinnell's generation as they enter the "late period." These new poems are as muted and personal as much of his previous work was hyperbolic and overscaled. That their burden is...