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Published: 1st December 1975

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"Remarkable. . . . What [these poems] are attempting is important: nothing less than the recovery for language of a whole domain of mute and familiar experience".--Hugh Kenner, The Los Angeles Times Book Review"It is refreshing to find a poet who is intellectually interesting and technically first-rate. Robert Pinsky belongs to that rarest category of talents, a poet- critic".--Robert Lowell"The pleasures of Pinsky . . . are the unfashionable, or at least the unfamiliar, ones of sanity, the cool entertainment of alternatives, and the conviction . . . that speech . . . is not only interesting but shares with both lyric and nonsense a certainty of resonance. . . ".--Richard Howard, Poetry

You may not be able to tell a book by its cover, but beware the title. This poet, for all his credentials (he's published in various prestigious "little magazines") never uses a metaphor when a lazy simile can be found, writes five words where one would suffice, and avoids new descriptions when old ones can be recycled ("shrewd Odysseus"!). He apostrophizes ("Soul, one's life is one's enemy"), he personalizes ("The sky reaches down"), he lists, he repeats, he lists, he repeats. . . like a good professor, he never says something once. The devices apart, he is irretrievably banal: "I am quite sure that I have read somewhere/ That the rate of suicide among psychiatrists/ Is far higher than for any other profession.// There are many myths to explain such things, things/ Which one reads and believes without believing/ Any one significance for them - as in this case,// Which again reminds me of writers, who, I have read,/ Drink and become alcoholics and die of alcoholism/ In far greater numbers than other people." No illumination, grace, or wit (one fine exception, "The Destruction of Long Branch"), merely line divisions of "sentences too flat for any poems." (Kirkus Reviews)

ISBN: 9780691013220
ISBN-10: 0691013225
Series: Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets (Paperback)
Audience: Professional
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Number Of Pages: 84
Published: 1st December 1975
Dimensions (cm): 21.2 x 21.5  x 1.979
Weight (kg): 0.114