SOURCE: "Galway Kinnell: A Voice to Lead Us," in The Hollins Critic, Vol. XXXII, No. 4, October, 1995, pp. 1-15.

In the following essay, Kinnell's career is surveyed in light of the publication of Imperfect Thirst.

In this last decade of an apocalyptic century, many of us begin to search for the voices who can lead us away from despair for humanity and toward hope for the next era. The publication of Galway Kinnell's latest book, Imperfect Thirst, provides an opportunity to review the career of a poet who may turn out to be one of those voices. Few writers have embraced the contemporary existential view of life with as much grace and affirmation as Kinnell. In his poetry, he has made the shift successfully from the theistic framework of our forebears to the secular one our culture has claimed as its own, a shift, for Kinnell, that does not...