The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World Poems 1953-1964 [Paperback]

This newly assembled volume draws from two books that were originally published in Galway Kinnell's first two decades of writing, WHAT A KINGDOM IT WAS (1960), which included the poem The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World, and FLOWER HERDING ON MOUNT MONADNOCK (1964). Kinnell has revised some of the work in this new edition, and comments on his working method in a prefatory note.

This newly assembled volume draws from two books that were originally published in Galway Kinnell's first two decades of writing, WHAT A KINGDOM IT WAS (1960), which included the poem The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World, and FLOWER HERDING ON MOUNT MONADNOCK (1964). Kinnell has revised some of the work in this new edition, and comments on his working method in a prefatory note.

Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock

1

I can support it no longer.
Laughing ruefully at myself For all I claim to have suffered I get up. Damned nightmarer!

It is New Hampshire out here, It is nearly the dawn.
The song of the whippoorwill stops And the dimension of depth seizes everything.

2

The whistlings of a peabody bird go overhead Like a needle pushed five times through the air, They enter the leaves, and come out little changed.

The air is so still That as they go off through the trees The love songs of birds do not get any fainter.

3

The last memory I have Is of a flower that cannot be touched,

Through the bloom of which, all day, Fly crazed, missing bees.

4

As I climb sweat gets up my nostrils, For an instant I think I am at the sea,

One summer off Cap Ferrat we watched a black seagull Straining for the dawn, we stood in the surf,

Grasshoppers splash up where I step, The mountain laurel crashes at my thighs.

5

There is something joyous in the elegies Of birds. They seem Caught up in a formal delight, Though the mourning dove whislƒ²