When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone

From the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, a collection of poems ranging from melancholy meditations of a solitary mind concerning estrangement and the longing for reconnection to the natural world and its creatures closely observed.

“When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone is a poem that invites us, too, to pay such keen attention—both by seeing and listening—to the world, while also paying respect to our own inner lives, our feelings of solitude or self-estrangement, our longings and obligations to each other."—Jennifer GrotzGalway Kinnell lives in Vermont and New York City. He has been the director of an adult education program in Chicago, a journalist in Iran, and a field worker for the Congress of Racial Equality in Louisiana. During the past twenty years he has taught poetry at colleges and universities in this country and in France and Australia. His Selected Poems, published in 1982, won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He is a former MacArthur Fellow and has been State Poet of Vermont. He is currently Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University.