by Galway Kinnell (Author)
Galway Kinnell's twelfth book of poems is powerful and thrilling. Imperfect Thirst includes beautiful love poems and approaches elemental subjects with a remarkable balance of good nature and holy dread: recollections of childhood, snapshots of impassive cruelty, reflections on art and nature. This energetic collection will prove once again why Galway Kinnell is one of America's masters of the art.
Back Jacket
Galway Kinnell's twelfth collection of poems, Imperfect Thirst, is powerful and thrilling, beautifully crafted and astonishingly candid. In it, Kinnell approaches elemental subjects with a remarkable balance of good nature and holy dread. It includes re-visions of moments of childhood and youth; reflections on the relationship between humans and the other creatures; poems bearing on music, language, sex, mortality; five poems based on the form of the Persian ghazal; love poems; and a tender evocation of a daughter taking care of her old father. Five longer poems close the book: a meditation on the lasting reverberations of childhood trauma; a lively ode to excrement; a disquisition on flies which weaves together the observations of thirteen other poets; a looking back at the past and a child's looking forward; and an elegy for a beloved sister. Imperfect Thirst is a bold, exact, passionate book from a poet at the height of his powers.