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

Robert Pinsky (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 7, 1997

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.

Editorial Reviews

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.

From Publishers Weekly

To say that Pinsky's verse is thunderous is not to imply that it is loud and unbridled. Rather, like the true nature of thunder, each poem begins with a bolt to make its presence known (as with titles like "The Want Bone" and "Doctor Frolic" or such first lines as "Afternoon light like pollen"), rumbles on to strike primitive chords of religion and mythology in the reader's mind and winds down to a charged silence hanging on the coattails of a simple image. Brought together here are 16 new poems, the work of his four original collections and a sampling of his fine translations, including a canto from his well-received version of the Inferno. Taken as a whole, this is the record of a poet who grows from highly competent to near-transcendent, becomes more serious in tone while more complex in meter and enlivens everything from a baseball game to observations of his young daughter to an essay, in verse, on psychiatrists with a language that would be equally at home on vellum.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (April 7, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374525064
• ISBN-13: 978-0374525064
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #464,355 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pinsky is Number One!, January 13, 2000

By 

tmchurch (Moscow, Russia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996 (Paperback)

Not since William Morris put ink to paper and stained "Tyger, Tyger" has a poet moved me so much as Bob Pinsky has! A solid methodological and whimsically "fresh air" aspect underscores and overdetermines his every line and meme! I loved it so much I forgot who August Kleinzahler was for a minute! Boffo!

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars solid, solid work, April 30, 2003

By 

I X Key "burningfield" (tomorrow) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996 (Paperback)

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 declares as a poet is not his field, not quite, as nothing can stop the poet from thinking (no matter how much exile that means, I must add)but the thinking of poetry is be for poetry.

He is a very important poet. He was honored with the distinction of U.S. poet laureate three times in a row -- the first ever to be three times in a row -- because he's done more work for the vitality of poetry than almost any other person alive, matched or nearly matched by very few. In his scholarship, he studies everything so intently. In his writing, he channels the world through an equally unsparing dedication to mastery.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Metaphysical Poetry for the people, October 1, 2000

By 

Manuel Haas - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996 (Paperback)

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 wanted to place himself in the tradition of Whitman. And there is something Whitmanesque (?) in the sheer width of Pinsky's concerns - in contrast to contemporaries who dig in the same ground over and over again, Pinsky's imagination tries to encompass the variousness of what's going on around him and in his mind. Just flicking through the table of contents will show you that "Jesus and Isolt" or "The New Saddhus" sit comfortably side by side with what seems like childhood memoirs. Pinsky's humour and sense of irony are a far cry from Whitman, however, and so is his stylistic variety which matches the one of his concerns.

The Pinsky I like best is the one of the rather short, unpretentious poems like "The Beach Women". Here, the speaker recalls his youthful fascination with thirtyish women in the 50s:
"On those days I admired their tans, white dresses, / And pink oval fingernails on brown hands, and sold them / Perfume and lipstick, aspirins, throat lozenges and Tums, / Tampax, newspapers an paperback books - brave stays / Against boredom, discomfort, death and old age."

Other poems may seem daunting by the learnedness they display or by the whimsy of their conceits (I guess that is what put off some of the readers here), but I can only advise you to come back to those poems again - Pinsky's are poems you will not forget; and the more you are familiar with his poetry, the more you will appreciate it.

If Pinsky starts in a Whitmanesque vein ("possible to feel briefly like Jesus, / A gust of diffuse tenderness"), he is honest enough to go on: "But how love falters and flags / When anyone's difficult eyes come / Into focus, terrible gaze of a unique / Soul, its need unlovable" - but he does not leave it at that either. Find out for yourself!