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List Price: $17.00Price: $3.97 You Save: $13.03 (77%)as of 12/15/2009 04:23 EST
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.54
EAN: 9780374525064
Edition: First Edition Thus
ISBN: 0374525064
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 320
Publication Date: April 07, 1997
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Editorial Review:
Amazon.com Review:
Katha Pollitt writes that these are "extraordinarily accomplished and beautiful poems." Pinsky is a respected critic and translator and, as a poet, is a genius of sound and lineation. He also excels at the startling image, as when he describes a brain as "humming to itself, / Like a fat person eating M&Ms in the bathtub." The vividness of the image grabs our attention even as its poignancy and cruel edge complicate the tone of this intricate poem ("History of My Heart"). An impressive and moving collection.
Product Description:
The Figured Wheel fully collects the first four books of poetry, as well as twenty-one new poems, by Robert Pinsky, the former U.S. Poet Laureate.
Critic Hugh Kenner, writing about Pinsky's first volume, described this poet's work as "nothing less than the recovery for language of a whole domain of mute and familiar experience." Both the transformation of the familiar and the uttering of what has been hitherto mute or implicit in our culture continue to be central to Pinsky's art. New poems like "Avenue" and "The City Elegies" envision the urban landscape's mysterious epitome of human pain and imagination, forces that recur in "Ginza Samba," an astonishing history of the saxophone, and "Impossible to Tell," a jazz-like work that intertwines elegy with both the Japanese custom of linking-poems and the American tradition of ethnic jokes. A final section of translations includes Pinsky's renderings of poems by Czeslaw Milosz, Paul Celan, and others, as well as the last canto of his award-winning version of the Inferno.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
Technically brilliant, sonically frugal, stylistically innovative, thematically esoteric, topically abundant and educated. Sure.
Pinksy is all these good things, but ultimately hollow. He perks the mind but dulls the soul. But no matter. He has given to poetry what he can: a voice and face, a teacher's wisdom, a word to the masses, and (of course) technically pristine verse. This is as far as his person can take him - and he should go no further.
He's aced poetry, but ... Read More
Rating:  -
This is one of the best books of poetry I've ever read. I personally own over 100 books of poetry, including anthologies and I can say, without a doubt, this may be one of the best books written in modern times and certainly in our lifetime.
Rating: -
I guess his work is so controversial because it's so thoroughly formalist in a time of experimentation. He is a very feeling person, a poet of feeling & great genius. He addresses all sorts of themes in these poems. All sorts, from the serenely bucolic [he sometimes begins poems by showing the reader that he's been sure to learn things about what he uses for images) to overtly sexual experiments that he says in the poem make you feel dirty. In one he muses about philosophy in general, which he ... Read More
Rating:  -
Here began the death of all substantial poets.
Rating: -
In contrast to, say, John Ashbery, Charles Simic, or Mark Strand, Robert Pinsky's poetry is practically unknown among literary circles in Europe. I guess it is Pinsky's variety both in tone and subject matter, which make him hard to place, and maybe even more, his obviously positive attitude towards life and ordinary people, which make it impossible for him ever to become the darling of European intellectuals.
Writing a long poem called "An Explanation of America" makes it look as if Pinsky ... Read More
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Dewey Decimal Number: 811.54
EAN: 9780374525064
Edition: First Edition Thus
ISBN: 0374525064
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 320
Publication Date: April 07, 1997
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux