Dollars, dolors. Callings and contrivances. King Zulu. Comus. Sephardic ju-ju and verses. Voodoo mojo, Special Forces. Henry formed a group named Professor Longhair and his Shuffling Hungarians. After so much renunciation And invention, is this the image of the promised end? All music haunted by all the music of the dead forever. Becky haunted forever by Pearl the daughter she abandoned For love, O try my tra-la-la, ma la belle, mah walla-woe.
-from "Gulf Music"
An improvised, even desperate music, yearning toward knowledge across a gulf, informs Robert Pinsky's first book of poetry since Jersey Rain (2000).
On the large scale of war or the personal scale of family history, in the movements of people and cultures across oceans or between eras, these poems discover connections between things seemingly disparate.
"Pinsky is our finest living specimen of this sadly rare breed, and the poems of "Gulf Music" are among the best examples we have of poetry's ability to illuminate not only who we are as humans, but who we are"
and can be
"The success of poems like "Poem With Lines in Any Order" and "Poem of Disconnected Parts," both from Gulf Music, hinges on their ability to strip away and deliberately obfuscate narrative in a manner that feels engaging and pleasurable, rather than contrived."
