The Figured Wheel New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996 [Paperback]

The Figured Wheelfully 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 theInferno.

A former Poet Laureate of the United States,Robert Pinskywas born and raised in Long Branch, New Jersey. In addition to his books of poetry andThe Inferno of Dante, he has written prose works, includingThe Life of DavidandThe Sounds of Poetry.

Pinsky's decision to reprint his four previous volumes in their entirety, without revision, requires some daring: how many poets would not benefit from selection? Daring of one kind or another has always been a feature of Pinsky's work, although it showed itself first in his refusal to be daring in the easily recognizable ways represented by confessional poetry and surrealism, the modes that dominated poetic taste when Pinsky began publishing. In defiance of those fashions, Pinsky set out to write a sociable poetry of ordinary life, relying on earnest sentiment, rational exposition, and a certain modest cleverness. The results of that program still seem l#*