“****Robert Pinsky belongs to that rarest category of talents, a poet-critic.”—Robert LowellTwo important books of criticism by the Pulitzer Prize finalist and former U.S. poet laureate—now combined in a single volume with a new preface by the authorFor Robert Pinsky, poetry’s individual, human scale as a fundamentally vocal medium—with poems brought to life by one person at a time—gives poetry a unique importance in American and democratic...

The remarkable first two books of poetry by the Pulitzer Prize finalist and former U.S. poet laureate—now combined in a single volume with a new preface by the authorAward-winning poet Robert Pinsky’s first two collections—Sadness And Happiness and An Explanation of America—announced the arrival of a major new voice in American poetry. Now, these acclaimed books are presented together in a single volume featuring a new preface by ...

From the former U.S. Poet Laureate, "a keenly idiosyncratic account of the place of poetry in our time . . . not only interesting but suspenseful to read" (James Logenbach, The Nation )."Poetry is a vocal, which is to say a bodily, art," Robert Pinsky declares in The Sounds of Poetry. "The medium of poetry is the human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the m...

“Magnificent . . . poems to inspire [with] brief and brilliant, offhand notes about how to read them.”—Alan Cheuse, NPRQuick, 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— in terms borrowed...

A new book of poems by the three-time poet laureate Robert Pinsky, a writer "rarely equalled" (Louise Glück).Robert Pinsky, one of our most ambitious, inventive, and finely tuned poets, takes an original approach to the fraught, central matter of borders in Proverbs of Limbo, his first new book of poetry in eight years.In this collection, the poet mines and maps limbal regions: those spaces between differences that can be at once creative and oppre...

Part of the Jewish Encounter seriesPoet, warrior, and king, David has loomed large in myth and legend through the centuries, and he continues to haunt our collective imagination, his flaws and inconsistencies making him the most approachable of biblical heroes. Robert Pinsky, former poet laureate of the United States, plumbs the depths of David’s life: his triumphs and his failures, his charm and his cruelty, his divine destiny and his human humiliations. Drawing o...

In this book Robert Pinsky writes about contemporary poetry as it reflects its modernist and Romantic past. He isolates certain persistent ideas about poetry's situation relative to life and focuses on the conflict the poet faces between the nature of words and poetic forms on one side, and the nature of experience on the other.The author ranges for his often surprising examples from Keats to the great modernists such as Stevens and Williams, to the contents of recent magazines. He...

From Sadness and Happiness: Poems by Robert Pinsky:CEREMONY FOR ANY BEGINNINGRobert PinskyAgainst weather, and the randomHarpies--mood, circumstance, the lawsOf biography, chance, physics--The unseasonable soul holds forth,Eager for form as a renownedPedant, the emperor's man of worth,Hereditary arbiter of manners.Soul, one's life is one's enemy.As the small children learn, what happens...

C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933) lived in relative obscurity in Alexandria, and a collected edition of his poems was not published until after his death. Now, however, he is regarded as the most important figure in twentieth-century Greek poetry, and his poems are considered among the most powerful in modern European literature.This revised bilingual edition of Collected Poems offers the reader the original Greek texts facing what are now recognized as the standard English transla...

Discover the darker side of the Garden State with this anthology of gritty mystery stories.Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each volume is compromised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct location within the geographical area of the book. In New Jersey Noir, a star-studded cast of authors sifts through the hidden dirt of the Garden State.Featuring br...

From An Explanation of America:LAIRRobert PinskyInexhaustible, delicate, as ifWithout source or medium, daylightUndoes the mind; the infinite,Empty actual is too bright,Scattering to where the roadWhispers, through a mile of woods …Later, how quiet the house is:Dusk-like and refined,The sweet Phoebe-notePiercing from the trees;The calm globe of the morning,Things to read...

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 hisShuffling Hungarians. After so much renunciationAnd 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 abandonedFor love, O try my tra-la-la, ma la belle, mah walla-woe.