The Figured Wheel New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996

by Pinsky, Robert

• ISBN13: 9780374525064
• ISBN10: 0374525064
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-04-07
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

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. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University and has also taught at the University of California at Berkeley. His books includeHistory of My Heart: Poems,The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide,Jersey Rain: Poems, andThe Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996. 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. "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 fresh today, twenty years afterSadness and Happiness, Pinsky's first book of poems, appeared in 1975."Langdon Hammer,The Yale Review "There are times in these poems when one feels . . . that what is presented as a kind of grand vision of humanity is a version of self-delight. As with Whitman [there is] a potential for coldness in Mr. Pinsky's wide-angle vision. Most of the time, though, the poems of his maturity manage their startling shifts and juxtapositions in ways that give intellectual and sensuous delight . . . What makes Mr. Pinsky such a rewarding and exciting writer is the sense he gives, in the very shape and structure of his poems, of getting at the depths of human experience, in which everything is al

Author Biography

A former Poet Laureate of the United States, Robert Pinsky was born and raised in Long Branch, New Jersey. In addition to his books of poetry and The Inferno of Dante, he has written prose works, including The Life of David and The Sounds of Poetry.

Table of Contents

The City Dark	p. 3
Ginza Samba	p. 5
Poem with Refrains	p. 7
Round	p. 10
In Berkeley	p. 11
City Elegies I. The Day Dreamers	p. 13
City Elegies II. "Everywhere I Go, There I Am"	p. 14
City Elegies III. House Hour	p. 15
City Elegies IV. Street Music	p. 16
City Elegies V. Soot	p. 17
City Elegies VI. The Tuning	p. 18
Avenue	p. 19
The Ice-Storm	p. 21
Desecration of the Gravestone of Rose P	p. 24
Creation According to Ovid	p. 26
The Heartmoss	p. 28
Falling Asleep	p. 29
Waking Up	p. 30
If You Could Write One Great Poem, What Would You Want It to Be About?	p. 31
Incantation	p. 32
Impossible to Tell	p. 33
From the Childhood of Jesus	p. 41
Memoir	p. 43
Window	p. 46
The Hearts	p. 47
The Want Bone	p. 50
Shiva and Parvati Hiding in the Rain	p. 51
The Uncreation	p. 53
Lament for the Makers	p. 55
Picture	p. 58
Icicles	p. 59
Visions of Daniel	p. 60
Pilgrimage	p. 64
Jesus and Isolt	p. 66
Immortal Longings	p. 73
Exile	p. 74
An Old Man	p. 75
What Why When How Who	p. 76
Voyage to the Moon	p. 80
Shirt	p. 84
The Night Game	p. 86
Sonnet	p. 89
Dreamer	p. 90
The Refinery	p. 91
Hut	p. 93
The Ghost Hammer	p. 95
At Pleasure Bay	p. 97
The Figured Wheel	p. 105
The Unseen	p. 107
The Volume	p. 109
The Cold	p. 111
Faeryland	p. 113
Three on Luck	p. 115
The New Saddhus	p. 117
The Changes	p. 119
History of My Heart	p. 123
Ralegh's Prizes	p. 133
The Saving	p. 134
The Questions	p. 136
A Woman	p. 138
Dying	p. 140
Flowers	p. 141
The Garden	p. 143
A Long Branch Song	p. 144
Song of Reasons	p. 145
The Street	p. 147
Lair	p. 153
An Explanation of America Part One: Its Many Fragments	p. 157
An Explanation of America Part Two: Its Great Emptiness	p. 169
An Explanation of America Part Three: Its Everlasting Possibility	p. 185
Memorial	p. 200
Poem About People	p. 207
The Time of Year, The Time of Day	p. 209
Ceremony for Any Beginning	p. 210
Waiting	p. 211
December Blues	p. 213
Discretions of Alcibiades	p. 214
Tennis	p. 217
Sadness And Happiness	p. 223
To My Father	p. 235
Old Woman	p. 237
Library Scene	p. 238
First Early Mornings Together	p. 240
The Sentences	p. 241
Daughter	p. 242
The Personal Devil	p. 245
Spelunker	p. 246
The Generation Before	p. 248
The Street Of Furthest Memory	p. 251
Long Branch, New Jersey	p. 252
Doctor Frolic	p. 253
Pleasure Pier	p. 254
Essay on Psychiatrists	p. 257
Translations: Homecoming (Paul Celan)	p. 275
Translations: Love Crown (Paul Celan)	p. 276
Translations: Body (Boris Christov)	p. 277
Translations: Spirit (Boris Christov)	p. 278
Translations: Song on Porcelain (Czeslaw Milosz)	p. 280
Translations: Isaac Leybush Perets (Moshe Leib Halpern)	p. 282
Translations: The Rhyme of Reb Nachman	p. 284
Translations: From The Inferno of Dante: Canto XXXIV	p. 290
Notes	p. 297
Index of Titles	p. 303
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Chapter One

    THE CITY DARK

In the early winter dusk the broken city dark

Seeps from the tunnels. Up towers and in gusty alleys,

The mathematical veil of generation has lit its torches

To light the rooms of the mated and unmated: the two

Fated behind you and four behind them in the matrix

Widening into the past, eight, sixteen, thirty-two,

Many as the crystal dream cells illuminating the city.

Even for those who sleep in the street there are lights.

Like a heavy winter sleep the long flint cold of the past

Spreads over the glinting dream-blisters of the city, asleep

Or awake, as if the streets were an image of the channels

Of time, with sixty-four, one hundred and twenty-eight,

The ancestral net of thousands only a couple of centuries back,

With its migrations and fortunes and hungers like an image

Of the city where the star-dispelling lights have climbed

And multiplied over the tenements and outlying suburbs

Like a far past of multitudes behind us in the glistering web

Of strands crossing, thousands and tens of thousands

Of lives coupled with their gains, passions, misfortunes.

Somewhere in the tangled alleyways, a rape. Somewhere

A spirit diffused winglike, blind along the stretched wires

Branching the dark city air or bundled under the streets,

Coursing surely to some one face like an ancient song Do re,

Re la sol sol. Somewhere diaspora, somewhere

Back here one died of starvation, here one thrived. Descendant,

The bitter city work and the shimmering maternal burden

Of music uncoil outward on the avenues through smoky bars,

By televisions, beyond sleepers while the oblivion of generation

Radiates backward and then forward homeward to the one voice

Or face like an underground pool, through its delicate lightshaft

Moonlit, a cistern of light, echoing in a chamber cellared under

The dark of the city pavement, the faintly glittering slabs.

Copyright © 1996 Robert Pinsky. All rights reserved.