Galway Kinnell's The Book of Nightmares … emerges as one of the best long poems of recent years. It represents an unforeseeable leap forward for Kinnell. Although the earlier work prepares us for it through its imagery and concern with nature, there is nothing on this scale, nothing that extends man's spiritual dimensions so high and so low, nothing that extends the range of man's connections so far into biological and cosmic process—though such connections are made in the earlier poetry…. The Book of Nightmares is Kinnell's Divine Comedy, a Divine Comedy without God but with soul, a soul inseparable from body and from man's life in nature. Unlike Dante but like the romantic poets to whose tradition he belongs, Kinnell tries to pull an immortality out of our mortality.

The earlier poetry prepares us for The Book of Nightmares in that it shows Kinnell as one of...