Jersey Rain [Hardcover]

Robert Pinsky (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2000

Impassioned, Personal Poems From America's Poet Laureate.

It spends itself regardless into the ocean. It stains and scours and makes things dark or bright: Sweat of the moon, a shroud of benediction, The chilly liquefaction of day to night,

The Jersey rain, my rain, soaks all as one: It smites Metuchen, Rahway, Saddle River, Fair Haven, Newark, Little Silver, Bayonne. I feel it churning even in fair weather

To craze distinction, dry the same as wet. --from "Jersey Rain"

Jersey Rain--at once masterly and intimate--marks a fresh, lyrical stage of Robert Pinsky's work. Poems like "Samurai Song," "ABC," "Ode to Meaning," "To Television," and "The Green Piano" have already attracted a wide readership. Now, assembled in this book, they become part of a larger, fugue-like meditation on the themes of a life guided by Hermes: deity of music and deception, escort of the dead, inventor of instruments, the brilliant messenger and trickster of heaven.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Despite the Springsteen-esque title, the same phrasal gifts that drive 1996's new and collected volume, The Figured Wheel, and Pinsky's acclaimed translation of the Inferno, are well-displayed in this slim, sixth collection. Unfortunately, most of the poems' occasions and insights don't quite measure up to the rhetorical firepower turned upon them. The hortatory mode dominates the collection: "To the Phoenix" begins, "Dark herald, self-conceived in the desert waste,/ What yang or yin enfolds your enigma best?" Invoking Prufrock, the body as "Vessel" is implored "O veteran immersed from toe to crown,// Buoy the population of the soul/ Toward their destination before they drown." "A Phonebook Cover Hermes of the Nineteen-forties" features "Fire zigzag in his grasp, labeled 'Spirit/ Of Communication'--unhistorical,/ Pure, the merciless messenger." There is pleasure in the sheer muscle of these constructions, and it's clear that the poet's archaisms are within his control. Yet the name-checks--of Oprah, Ecco press editor Daniel Halpern and others--grow tiresome, and the stabs at intimacy are tinged with a neo-Lowellian obsession with guilt and grandeur. One can't help reading pretentious references to Pinsky's duties as U.S. poet laurate into an "Autumn Quartet" (written "On my birthday"), which calls on "the heros of antiquity /To pass their lonely double knowledge on/ To such as Odysseus, who learned to tell the story/ Of his life, couched in as many lies as needed./ Among the epic bravos, a civic man." The prose centerpiece, "An Alphabet of My Dead," brings in family, a student suicide, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's Oxford Book of English Verse and "Plural dead in categories like counting sheep, the exterminated Jews of Europe, the obliviated Kallikaks of New Jersey " among others. "To Television," "The Green Piano" and other lighter pieces will delight fans, but the poems with more profound aspirations lack a penetrating introspection. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Pinsky has several careers within the realm of literature: poet, translator, and public advocate of poetry. All of these influences can be felt in his new collection, which is the first assembly of his own lyric verse to appear since The Want Bone (The Figured Wheel served as a Collected Earlier Poems). At times, his poems reach for the extra-personal, the mythic or abstract, as in "The Knight's Prayer" or "To the Phoenix"; at others, they move through personal or confessional modes, as in "An Alphabet of My Dead" or "To Television." Pinsky seems most comfortable with the gnomic or elevated phrase: "The shifting hero wanders alien places,/ Through customs of cities and histories of races,/ Recollects, travels and summons together all--/ All manners of the dead and living, in the great Hall." Occasionally, his differing manners collide strangely, but Pinsky delivers, as ever, intelligent, pensive poetry of great beauty. For most collections.
-Graham Christian, formerly with Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, MA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 80 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux; 1st edition (April 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374178879
• ISBN-13: 978-0374178871
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,354,115 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Formal Wonder, April 3, 2000

By 

"ik001f" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jersey Rain (Hardcover)

The strongest pieces in this book [Samurai Song, Ode to Meaning, Abc & An Alphabet of My Dead, To Television, The Green Piano, Jersey Rain] are mostly formal poems which work magically because their author is able to overcome the limits of form. Which is to say that in these poems Pinsky is not just a craftsman of verse but a poet whose humanity speaks to us between the lines. He is no longer a slave to his rhymes - he makes the rhymes work for him and does so magnificently. It would not be an overstatement to claim that the pieces like "Green Piano," "Samurai Song," and "Jersey Rain" are among the best works of poetry published in a decade. Buy the book and figure it out for yourself. Green Piano shines with the joy of a good writing. Yes, you must definitely buy this book.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars There's a hidden depth here, at least in most of the poems, December 2, 2003

By 

B. Allen (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Jersey Rain: Poems (Paperback)

When I received "Jersey Rain" as a gift last year, I initially read it through once and put it down for a few months, deciding that Pinsky (more so even than Seamus Heaney or Derek Walcott) was a poet more concerned about pretentious mythological name-dropping than about true depth. I have since decided that my judgment was too harsh, and I've gone back and re-read some of the poems many times. I think "Samurai Song" stands as the strongest poem in here (not coincidentally, it makes no references to Greek mythology...) and is the one that I read most often. The other poems I especially enjoy are "The Knight's Prayer," "Victrola," "Steel Drum Variations," "Biography," "Song," "Ode to Meaning," "The Haunted Ruin" and "Vessel." Pinsky is able to achieve profundity in the most surprising ways, and is even able to poke fun at himself and his craft (witness "Ode to Meaning").

Contrary to some other reviewers, I find that "ABC," while it's a clever and fun experiment, fails in the last line ("X = your zenith" What the hell does that mean?). Nevertheless, for those looking for some breathtaking poetry with a good balance between pretension (which, as I've come to realize, is not always a bad thing), lyricism and depth, "Jersey Rain" is a decent bet.

10 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hey, man--I'm from Jersey too, April 3, 2000

By 

B - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jersey Rain (Hardcover)

A thin volume, full of jewles--dark-colored jewles, like rubies and emeralds, lit by candlelight inside a church. The secret to reading a Pinsky poem is to read it very slowly, out loud, annunciating each syllable as though it were its own line: you will realize that the slimness of this book is misleading. Pinsky seems to construct each of his poems out of perfect sound, so carefully that each line--free verse or otherwise--resonates with meaning and memorability, as anyone who has read THE FIGURED WHEEL will probably already know. A worthy addition to Pinsky's already rich body of work. I'm grateful to have read it.