Intense verbal music with a jazz feeling; invention against the grain of expectation; intelligence racing among materials with the variety of a busy street-these have been the qualities of Robert Pinsky's work since his first book, Sadness and Happiness (1975), celebrated for setting a new direction in American poetry. At that time, responding to a question about that book, Pinsky said: "I would like to write a poetry which could contain every kind of thing, while keeping all the excitement of poetry."
That ambition was realized in a new way with each of his books, including the book-length personal monologue An Explanation of America; the transformed autobiography of History of My Heart; the bestselling translation The Inferno of Dante; and, most recently, the savage, inventive Gulf Music. That variety and renewal are represented in this brilliantly chosen volume.
"One might say that Pinsky has attended well Hamlet's advice to the players, and, in the very tempest of his passion and inspiration, acquires and begets a temperance to give all smoothness. The pleasures of Pinsky's poems are found in their capable smoothness, their balance, and, here and there, little fillips that smack the ear and jar the mind."
Donald Brown, The Quarterly Conversation
"Simply said, Robert Pinsky is one of the few literary artists working in our language whose work is unquestionably major work."
Louise Glück
"[Pinksy's] poems are striking in their desire to open wide ... and contain everything, to refuse absolutely to reject anything ... Pinsky's poems rarely lend themselves to easy and decisive interpretation. (For this reason they tend to grow rather than wither with rereading.) One might say of his work, as one would say of jazz, that the point is less to interpret or understand it than to enjoy th
