by Galway Kinnell.

Houghton Mifflin .72 pages. $25; with CD.

 In this his 11th volume of verse, his first in a decade, Pulitzer winner Galway Kinnell makes good on the paradoxical promise of the pure poet: to teach us about life in general by writing poems distinguished for their particularity and verbal honesty. That’s a big order; many poets do one or the other, few do both simultaneously. The strain shows.

This book is divided into five sections. In the middle is “When the Towers Fell,” Kinnell’s poem on 9/11, a big public ode with quotes from Villon, Crane, Celan, Wat and Whitman. Using vivid imagery and catalogs, saying “we” more often than “I,” it places the disaster “as a corollary” to the 20th century’s “history of violent death.” The last section begins, “In our minds the glassy blocks succumb over and over . . .” and then, for four stanzas, they do . . . until “each life, put out, lies down within us.” The final line stretches the reader, so well prepared by the poem, to the breaking point.

Surrounding the middle section are mostly personal poems of domestic life. Kinnell, who grew up in Pawtucket, is an eco-poet in the best sense: he writes out of his niche of human and non-human attachments. The death of a snake in a trash fire, the afterlife in the corpse of a mole are treated with the same passion, perhaps with more, as are human matters like a child’s birthday party, the death of friends, sleeping with his wife.

In “Conversation,” his daughter asks him a series of questions; his answers are oracular. The “form” is Q & A. When the daughter remembers the “bright splashes” made by pennies they put on the track, he responds: “Everything startles with its beauty / when assigned value has been eradicated . . . .”

We are reminded that in 1968 Kinnell introduced the American public to the poetry of Yves Bonnefoy, a French poet who later rose to eminence. In Kinnell’s translation of “Place of the Salamander,” “The startled salamander freezes / And feigns death. / This is the first step of consciousness among the stones, / The purest myth, / A great fire passed through, which is spirit.”

In his long distinguished career, Kinnell has been our Salamander: the path through fire, the death of individual consciousness, to spirit. Some call it shamanism: it’s pure poetry.

In “Pure Balance,” the pentultimate poem that foregoes his usual American imagery for a classical, almost French purity, he writes: “Clarity / turns out to be / an invisible form of sadness.” In the clarity of their achieved sounds, his poems risk being overlooked as minor. But like Frost, what he teaches is out of all proportion — or rather, he establishes, poem by poem, a true aesthetic proportion of word and deed.