Robert Pinsky

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. Gulf Music is perhaps the most ambitious, politically impassioned, and inventive book by this major...

Now assembled in this book, the Poet Laureate's poems become part of a larger, fugue-like meditation on the themes of life guided by Hermes: deity of music and deception, escort of the dead, inventor of instruments, the brilliant messenger and trickster of heaven.

Quick, joyful, and playfully astringent, with surprising comparisons and examples, this collection takes an unconventional approach to the art of poetry. Instead of rules, theories, or recipes, Singing School emphasizes ways to learn from great work: studying magnificent, monumentally enduring poems and how they are made. This anthology respects poetry's mysteries in two senses of the word: techniques of craft and strokes of the inexplicable. Pinsky's...

A guide to the enjoyment of poetry. It is composed of chapters dealing with sonic elements, accent and duration, syntax and line, like and unlike sounds, blank verse and free verse. The author illustrates these with examples from fifty poets.

"An alternatingly funny and poignant memoir from "our finest living example of [the American civic poet]" (New York Times). In late-1940s Long Branch, an historic but run-down Jersey Shore resort town, in a neighborhood of Italian, Black, and Jewish families, Robert Pinsky began his unlikely journey to becoming a poet. Descended from a bootlegger grandfather, an athletic father, and a rebellious tomboy mother, Pinsky was an unruly but articulate high-school...

"A new book of poems by three-time Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, a writer of "art whose scope and complexity and grandeur are rarely equalled" (Louise Glück)"--

"In these new poems the humble objects of everyday life - "door, photograph, newspaper, pen, book"--Become artifacts pointing to the very center of human difference. First Things to Hand is a kind of literate anthropology, but it is also vintage Pinsky: casually erudite, charged with steady passion, a pure pleasure to read."--Jacket.