Galway Kinnell is a poet of astonishing incarnations, he never seems to be where you last met him and he's always secure in his new adaptation. [The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World] brings together poems from his first three books, covering the years between 1946 and 1964, many of the earliest [having] been returned to their pre-revised form which, upon rediscovery, the author himself preferred…. By turn and with level facility, Kinnell is a poet of the landscape, a poet of soliloquy, a poet of the city's underside and a poet who speaks for thieves, pushcart vendors and lumberjacks with an unforced simulation of their vernacular. New England woods, the Oregon coast, Calcutta, T'ang Dynasty China, Wales and Manhattan's ghetto: his geography is global and it reveals, when paid close attention, a perennial dialogue of death and resurrection…. (p. 599)

Hard to believe, as we turn...