Selected Poems

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 poetry. At that time responding to a question about that book Pinsky said: I would like to write a poetry which could contain every kind of thing while keeping all the excitement of poetry.. That ambition was realized in a new way with each of his books including the book-length personal monologue An Explanation of America; the transformed autobiography of History of My Heart; the bestselling translation The Inferno of Dante; and most recently the savage inventive Gulf Music. That variety and renewal are represented in this brilliantly chosen volume.