SOURCE: "Galway Kinnell's Poetry of Transformation," in The Centennial Review, Vol. XXX, No. 1, pp. 41-56.

In the following essay, Kleinbard eaxamines The Book of Nightmares, specifically, as an example of Kinnell's poetry of a joyful acceptance of mortality as well as death 's redemptive power.

At the time of its publication in 1971 Galway Kinnell's The Book of Nightmares was praised as an evocation of a national trauma, the Vietnam war and its effects on this country. Now, after more than a decade, it seems more remarkable as an expression of private experience in visionary images. Cumulatively these images develop an epic scope and a timeless range of reference reminiscent of Kinnell's models, "Song of Myself" and Duino Elegies. Kinnell has said that The Book of Nightmares is an account of a journey whose starting point is dread and that "the book is nothing but an effort to face...