The Figured Wheel

This is one of the best books of poetry I've ever read. I personally own over 100 books of poetry, including anthologies and I can say, without a doubt, this may be one of the best books written in modern times and certainly in our lifetime.

I guess his work is so controversial because it's so thoroughly formalist in a time of experimentation. He is a very feeling person, a poet of feeling & great genius. He addresses all sorts of themes in these poems. All sorts, from the serenely bucolic [he sometimes begins poems by showing the reader that he's been sure to learn things about what he uses for images) to overtly sexual experiments that he says in the poem make you feel dirty. In one he muses about philosophy in general, which he declares as a poet is not his field, not quite, as nothing can stop the poet from thinking (no matter how much exile that means, I must add)but the thinking of poetry is be for poetry.He is a very important poet. He was honored with the distinction of U.S. poet laureate three times in a row -- the first ever to be three times in a row -- because he's done more work for the vitality of poetry than almost any other person alive, matched or nearly matched by very few. In his scholarship, he studies everything so intently. In his writing, he channels the world through an equally unsparing dedication to mastery.

In contrast to, say, John Ashbery, Charles Simic, or Mark Strand, Robert Pinsky's poetry is practically unknown among literary circles in Europe. I guess it is Pinsky's variety both in tone and subject matter, which make him hard to place, and maybe even more, his obviously positive attitude towards life and ordinary people, which make it impossible for him ever to become the darling of European intellectuals. Writing a long poem called "An Explanation of America" makes it look as if Pinsky wanted to place himself in the tradition of Whitman. And there is something Whitmanesque (?) in the sheer width of Pinsky's concerns - in contrast to contemporaries who dig in the same ground over and over again, Pinsky's imagination tries to encompass the variousness of what's going on around him and in his mind. Just flicking through the table of contents will show you that "Jesus and Isolt" or "The New Saddhus" sit comfortably side by side with what seems like childhood memoirs. Pinsky's humour and sense of irony are a far cry from Whitman, however, and so is his stylistic variety which matches the one of his concerns. The Pinsky I like best is the one of the rather short, unpretentious poems like "The Beach Women". Here, the speaker recalls his youthful fascination with thirtyish women in the 50s:"On those days I admired their tans, white dresses, / And pink oval fingernails on brown hands, and sold them / Perfume and lipstick, aspirins, throat lozenges and Tums, / Tampax, newspapers an paperback books - brave stays / Against boredom, discomfort, death and old age."Other poems may seem daunting by the learnedness they display or by the whimsy of their conceits (I guess that is what put off some of the readers here), but I can only advise you to come back to those poems again - Pinsky's are poems you will not forget; and the more you are familiar with his poetry, the more you will appreciate it. If Pinsky starts in a Whitmanesque vein ("possible to feel briefly like Jesus, / A gust of diffuse tenderness"), he is honest enough to go on: "But how love falters and flags / When anyone's difficult eyes come / Into focus, terrible gaze of a unique / Soul, its need unlovable" - but he does not leave it at that either. Find out for yourself!

"~Pinsky is one of my favorite contemporary American poets. He has most certainly not forgotten that SOUND is essential to all poetry, and the sounds of his lines are truly hypnotic. money.

Not since William Morris put ink to paper and stained "Tyger, Tyger" has a poet moved me so much as Bob Pinsky has! A solid methodological and whimsically "fresh air" aspect underscores and overdetermines his every line and meme! I loved it so much I forgot who August Kleinzahler was for a minute! Boffo!