"Since the death of Robert Lowell in 1977, no single figure has dominated American poetry the way that Lowell, or before him Eliot, once did . . . But among the many writers who have come of age in our fin de siècle, none have succeeded more completely as poet, critic, and translator than Robert Pinsky." —James Longenbach , The NationWith all the generosity and mastery we have come to expect from out three-time Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky has writ...

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...

In late-1940s Long Branch, a 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 C student, whose obsession with the rhythms and melodies of speech inspired him to write.Pinsky traces the roots of his poetry, with its wide and fea...

**"Truly the voice of the Jersey Shore." —Bruce Springsteen“Evocative.”—New York Times Book ReviewAn alternatingly funny and poignant memoir from three-term poet laureate Robert Pinsky.**In late-1940s Long Branch, a 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 t...

“****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 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...

Impassioned, Personal Poems From America's Poet Laureate"It spends itself regardless into the ocean.It stains and scours and makes things dark or bright:Sweat of the moon, a shroud of benediction,The chilly liquefaction of day to night,The Jersey rain, my rain, soaks all as one:It smites Metuchen, Rahway, Saddle River,Fair Haven, Newark, Little Silver, Bayonne.I feel i...

History of My Heart, winner of the William Carlos Williams Prize, first appeared in 1984. In The New Republic, J.D. McClatchy called it "one of the best books of the past decade." It is Pinsky's third volume of poems--and an ideal introduction to the work of a vital and original contemporary American poet.

The place of poetry in modern democracy is no place, according to conventional wisdom. The poet, we hear, is a casualty of mass entertainment and prosaic public culture, banished to the artistic sidelines to compose variations on insipid themes for a dwindling audience. Robert Pinsky, however, argues that this gloomy diagnosis is as wrongheaded as it is familiar. Pinsky, whose remarkable career as a poet itself undermines the view, writes that to portray poetry and democracy as enemies is ...

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...

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...