Robert Pinsky

This collection selects some of the best poetry by a three time former U.S. poet laureate and winner of the William Carlos Williams Prize. Intense verbal music with a jazz feeling; invention against the grain of expectation; intelligence racing among materials with the variety of a busy street, these have been the qualities of Robert Pinsky's work since his first book, Sadness and Happiness (1975), celebrated for setting a new direction in American...

""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 Nation The poems in Robert Pinsky's At the Foundling Hospital consider personality and culture as improvised from loss: a creative...

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,...

From Sadness and Happiness: Poems by Robert Pinsky: CEREMONY FOR ANY BEGINNING Robert Pinsky Against weather, and the random Harpies--mood, circumstance, the laws Of biography, chance, physics-- The unseasonable soul holds forth, Eager for form as a renowned Pedant, 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 Takes over, and what you were goes...

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...

100 poems selected by Robert Pinsky that represent each volume in The best American poetry series.

The first part of Dante's classic poem of faith follows the author with his guide Virgil through the circles of hell, describing the sinners and punishments witnessed there.