PARTISAN REVIEW
487
the death of others does to the self - Adrienne Rich lets herself discover
that, for one thing, the death of other creates the self, as the renuncia–
tion of illusion creates identity:
Now to give up the temptations of the projector; to see instead
the web of cracks filtering across the plaster.
To read there the map of the future, the roads radiating from
the initial split, the filaments thrown out from that impasse.
To reread the instructions on your palm; to find there how
the lifeline, broken, keeps its direction.
For Galway Kinnell, in his fourth book of poems, it is not the death
of others which creates the self; Kinnell does not have much truck with
others. Rather, it is the death of the self which, simply, creates. The
poet puts it to us with his characteristic tone, a tone of manliness
without machismo, of force without brutality, in a statement from a
forthcoming study of poetry: "Poetry has taken on itself the task of
breaking out of the closed ego. . . . The death of the self I seek, in
poetry and out of poetry, is not a drying up or withering. It is a death,
yes, but a death out of which one might hope to be reborn more
giving, more alive, more open, more related to the natural life." One
cannot take exception to these good intentions without simultaneously
opposing motherhood (though Kinnell, in his exaltation of fatherhood,
might
be
said to do just that by any competent Women's Liberatrix),
but I should like to note the pervasive superstition, one of the most ines–
capable of our times, the superstition of openness as, in itself, a Good
Thing. Here Kinnell, though as concerned with the myth of meta–
morphosis as Adrienne Rich, is on marshier ground, for he is all con–
cerned with changing to, not with changing from. He does not give
much heed to the past, for is there not the future? To put it another
way, he is forever opening up, and so what is left behind, untended,
tends to assume a charred and neglected aspect as Kinnell greets the
new life, the life of his children, of the earth, of his own transfigured
body.
The Book of Nightmares
is a single poem in ten parts ("it is right /
at the last, that one / and zero / walk off together, walk off the end of
these pages together, / one creature / walking away side by side with
the emptiness"), and it is about the consummation of the self in the
one sense in order to achieve consummation in the other. It is about how
"the raindrops trying / to put the fire out / fall into it and are
I
changed" -leaving therefore "this wet site / of old fires" which is the
poet's body, which is the earth and the human mind. But not human
memory. Memory and all it implies of convention, decorum, recurrence
