In [Galway Kinnell] we see that the idea of paradise gets reborn in the cultivation of waste places. (pp. 161-62)

Life is found in death, fountains in deserts, gain in loss, spring in winter, light in darkness. All these matters are the recurrent subjects of Kinnell's verse. He is a hero of the Absolute whose civilization exists in a burning mind which dreams forever upon itself, its first imagining. (p. 162)

The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ Into the New World, as the publisher's note in the book says, "will provide the opportunity to know the poems which were the preamble to the famous poems of [Kinnell's] later books," Body Rags and The Book of Nightmares. The collection in fact describes with terrible accuracy the career of a great poetic extremist, a self-confessed (or proclaimed?) "Damned nightmarer."

Here the sensible world is forever strangled in imagination. Nothing is...