"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.
"Gulf Music "is perhaps the most ambitious, politically impassioned, and inventive book by this major American poet. Robert Pinsky was Poet Laureate of the United States from 1997 to 2000. Creator and director of the Favorite Poem Project and poetry editor at "Slate," he also teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University. Robert Pinsky's poems have long been celebrated for their imaginative abundance, the uniqueness of their music, their originality and audacity. "Gulf Music" is his most daring, most politically impassioned book. In the first line, political prisoners are studying in their cells. In its last line, an oracle is lost. Between this labor of knowledge and this chasm of forgetfulness, between the political and the personal, from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Mexico, Pinsky has created a poetic universe that encompasses the familial, the cultural, the tribal, the national, and the spiritual. This is a haunting, bold, and savage work by a major American poet. From a vast array of experience and things--songs, the objects that furnish a desk, the architecture of small towns, war and love--these poems embody a sensibility more fiercely and urgently engaged than ever before. In the section called "First Things to Hand," objects like "Book," "Jar of Pens," and "Door" enact the way in which each part of life, each moment of perception or history, can be a portal into the universe. In the title poem, Pinsky plumbs the limits of the logic of ordinary language, instilling his lines with an order that includes an apparent near-chaos, but which resolves into a poignant, fierce, and utterly unprecedented vision of time, of music, of attachment and loss, of broken love and spiritual triumph. "In "Gulf Music" Pinsky offers us his most valuable contribution yet: not just an argument for but a demonstration of contemporary poetry's necessity and vitality in our democracy."--Joel Brouwer, "The New York Times Book Review" "In "Gulf Music" Pinsky offers us his most valuable contribution yet: not just an argument for but a demonstration of contemporary poetry's necessity and vitality in our democracy."--Joel Brouwer, "The New York Times Book Review
""Nothing less than the recovery for language of a whole domain of mute and familiar experience."--Hugh Kenner, "Los Angeles Times Book Review
""Anyone who knows Pinsky simply as a public figure is missing the real deal. I mean the sheer vitality of his own poems . . . He] builds a field of reference so panoramic that most novels and movies look rinky-dink by comparison . . . No living poet has greater reach of imagination."--Peter Campion, "The Boston Globe
"" Pinksy] makes wild, almost allegorical leaps into another realm of imagination . . . In 'The Figured Wheel, ' the bizarre juggernaut of the title rolls unstoppably over the world, gathering all times, places, persons, mythologies, religions and literature into its gorgeous hangings and inscriptions . . . Pinsky imagines ironic-marvelous tableaux vivants filled with grim enchantment."--Elizabeth Frank, "The Nation
""With lavish technical gifts, a discriminating civic intelligence, and an impish relish for what goes against the solemnities of a lot of contemporary verse, Pinsky has given us one of the outstanding bodies of work in the English-language poetry."--Justin Quinn, "The Boston Book Review
""Among the many writers who have come of age in our fin de siecle, none have succeeded more completely as a poet, critic and translator than Robert Pinsky."--James Longenbach, "The Nation
""No poet has defined his work more clearly than Robert Pinsky . . . Pinsky's new collection, "Gulf Music," shows all his characteristic skills: a tonal and lexical range that seems as large as the language's, an ability to write in both a pliant metric and a textured free verse, and a deft knack for getting seemingly disparate facets of experience to fit within the larger mosaics of the poems themselves. But one of the strengths of "Gulf Music" lies in Pinsky's readiness to explore the less evident aspects of his own work, to act as Trilling to his own Frost. In addition to the virtues that these new poems reveal by themselves, they also deepen and nuance our sense of the poet's already assured place in our literature. The very title of the volume, "Gulf Music," conveys the urge to examine gaps, lacks, and disconnection. This often shows in the forms of individual poems . . . The wonder of reading Pinsky's poems comes, I think, from the dual perspective, his ability to maintain both sweep and detail. The experience is something like flying over America. The shapes of highway cloverleafs and baseball diamonds, of rivers, industrial yards, and state parks appear with refreshed particularity. Jarred from habit, you begin to see the forms that these things make as they angle against one another, fanning out into a mosaic of plan and accident. But in Pinsky's poems you are also down inside the texture of life's experience. There is the street where, in typical American style, a turreted Queen Anne might be standing just around th
