By Mike Schneider

Galway Kinnell has turned 80. One of America's best poets, in other words, has lived a long time, and his newest book -- his first gathering of new work since 1994 -- shows him still vigorous with language, producing poems that express deep affection for life in a way that is uniquely Kinnell, one of the most arresting voices in poetry.

		"STRONG IS YOUR HOLD" By Galway Kinnell Houghton Mifflin ($25) Related story Poet's kind of town, Pittsburgh is ...

Perhaps more than any poet in English, Kinnell conveys emotional intensity that compares with the great 20th-century Hispanic poets, such as Pablo Neruda, Gabriel Garcia-Lorca and others.

Starting as a formalist in the manner of Frost, Kinnell opened up his line in the 1960s, influenced by Ginsberg's "Howl" and especially by Whitman, who was also Neruda's model for poetry that takes in everything and breathes out in large-voiced, passionate sympathy with the natural world, common people and their work, and physical love.

Kinnell's 1973 book-length poem "The Book of Nightmares" is a milestone of poetry in the past half-century. A work of fierce, almost bitter beauty, it reflects the social torment of the 1960s, when Kinnell was an antiwar activist poet and, before that, a field worker for the Congress of Racial Equality.

From a disparate assemblage of materials, including beautifully wrought imagery from the births of his children, Maud and Fergus, Kinnell brewed a hallucinatory stew that coheres, in a marvel of craft, by sheer intensity of voice. Toward the end of "Nightmares," the poet arrives at a kind of manifesto:

on the absolute whiteness of pages

a poem writes itself out: its title -- the dream

of all poems and the text of all loves -- "Tenderness toward Existence."

In this new collection, Kinnell's 11th, tenderness remains the right word to characterize poems that converse intimately with life, holding on, even more sweetly -- if that's possible -- in the unwavering near presence of mortality.

Few poetry book titles serve as well to signal the tenor of the poems as Kinnell's for this book, drawn from Whitman's "Last Invocation":

"Strong is your hold O mortal flesh,/Strong is your hold O love."

The book is dedicated to Bobbie, his second wife, younger by enough years that, as the poem "Promissory Note" observes, it "is all but certain" he will die first. Many readers will enjoy finding that at 80 Kinnell still writes gorgeous poems about the fulfillments of conjugal love.

The book's closing section includes several poems such as "Insomniac," in which the poet squirms near his bed partner to "lie there absorbing the astounding/ quantity of heat a slender body/ ovens up around itself." It's such a familiar scene, so well re-created that you feel as if someone must have written this poem exactly this way long ago, but they haven't.

"Family values" is a corrupted phrase, not often used in association with poetry, but Kinnell is, in the best way, a family-values poet, whose tenderness includes, along with conjugal love, deep affection for child rearing and family.

His children appear in several poems that open the book, including "Everyone Was in Love" -- which recalls the delight of seeing Maud and Fergus in the doorway, a dozen garter snakes draped over them like brand-new clothing.

They "were deliciously pleased with themselves./The snakes seemed to be tickled, too./We were enchanted. Everyone was in love."

It's typical of Kinnell that snakes and, in other poems, other lowly creatures -- voles, dung beetles, earthworms -- can be embraced, observed in minute detail. As he says in "Why Regret?"

What did you imagine lies in wait anyway

at the end of the world whose sub-substance

is glaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck?

The book's centerpiece, "When the Towers Fell," is Kinnell's long poem, first published in The New Yorker, about the 9/11 disaster. The twin towers were part of Kinnell's cityscape, visible from his Manhattan apartment when he taught at New York University.

The poem places the event in historical context and incorporates allusions to other poems, explained in notes at the back of the book.

"Pulling a Nail" is no doubt the longest poem you'll ever read about pulling a nail. Kinnell makes it into a contest between a son and his dead father who drove the nail. It's a rather amazing poem, comparing the nail's resistance to "an old pig who hears/the slaughterer's truck pull up/and rasp open its gate and rattle/its ramp into place, and grunts."

Kinnell has a reputation as a very fine reader. He enunciates with care in an expressive baritone that hums with undertone. A CD with the book lets you hear him in the comfort of your car or living room.

For many readers, 80-year-old Kinnell will be more approachable than the brilliant energy of "Nightmares." The voice is less fierce, less surreal, the structures more linear. For some readers, including this one, the years have somewhat tamed Kinnell's style. But a common denominator remains:

Poetry of rarely achieved tenderness and beauty.