SOURCE: "The Past and Other Works," in Galway Kinnell, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992, pp. 111-16.

Calhoun's explication of the poems in When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone follows in this excerpt.

In Galway Kinnell's tenth major book of poetry, When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone, which appeared in late 1990 from a new publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, he confronts his own solitariness from other people, including family, and ultimately that terminal loneliness, his own mortality. A key line in the volume might well be "everything sings and dies," but it could also be "everything dies and sings," the decisive perception from "Flower of Five Blossoms" (WOHLLTA, 52). Dying is a characteristic humankind share with other creatures, but singing is a resource that the poet finds in people. In these poems Kinnell writes of loss, separation, death, aloneness after the breakup of the family he has celebrated...