At the Foundling Hospital: Poems - Hardcover

Pinsky, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374158118 ISBN 13: 9780374158118

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016

Synopsis

The poems in Robert Pinsky's At the Foundling Hospital consider personality and culture as improvised from loss: a creative effort so pervasive it is invisible. An extreme example is the abandoned new-born. At the Foundling Hospital of eighteenth century London, in a benign and oddly bureaucratic process, each new infant was identified by a duly recorded token. A minimal, charged particle of meaning, the token might be a coin or brooch or thimble or sometimes a poem, such as the one quoted in full in Pinsky's poem "The Foundling Tokens." A foundling may inherit less of a past than an orphan, but with a wider set of meanings. The foundling soul needs to be adapted, and it needs to be adaptive. In one poem, French and German appear as originally Creole tongues, invented by the rough needs of conquered peoples and their Roman masters. In another, creators from scorned or excluded groups - among them Irving Berlin, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, and W.E.B. Du Bois - speak, as does the Greek tragic chorus, in the first person singular. In these poems, a sometimes desperate, perpetual reimagining of identity, on the scale of one life or of human history, is deeply related to music: The quest is lyrical, whether the subject is as specific as "the emanation of a dead star still alive" or as personal as the "pinhole iris of your mortal eye."

About this title

Review

"Resonant . . . stunning . . . These poems, with their careful word choices and refined music, demand multiple readings and reveal more each time. The collection, like two dying friends in one piece, leave "A shape distinct and present in the mind."" --Elizabeth Lund, Washington Post

"[Pinsky's] poems are methodical, carefully built, heady . . . gently sarcastic, and very good . . . But, Pinsky also suggests with no small amount of irony and wit in this prescient book, we've left bread crumbs in the language to help us find our way back to sanity, if only we'll follow them." --Craig Morgan Teicher, The Los Angeles Times

"Pinsky's erudite, jaunty, and finely distilled lyrics keenly consider genesis, ancestors know and concealed, enslaved and displaced, and our myriad attempts to define the cosmos and ourselves. Pinsky offers cunningly piquant catalog poems: biblical, skeptical, whimsical litanies of our endeavors and failures, from language itself to myth, religion, dance, jazz, and comic strips to war and environmental decimation as we spin round in perpetual desire and denial." --Donna Seaman, Booklist

"In his latest offering, Pinsky, a three-term U.S. Poet Laureate, visits a foundling hospital to discover the past. Pinsky, who started as a jazz musician, excels at figures of sound--rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, and assonance." --Library Journal

"In this ode to "Mind, mind, mind pulled/ Taut in its bony shell/ Dreaming up Heaven and Hell," Pinsky celebrates the individual imagination while complicating the idea of single point of origin or influence . . . Relatively spare poems offer sweeping meditations on history." --Publisher's Weekly

"Resonant . . . Stunning . . . These poems, with their careful word choices and refined music, demand multiple readings and reveal more each time. The collection, like two dying friends in one piece, leave 'A shape distinct and present in the mind.'" --Elizabeth Lund, The Washington Post

"[Pinsky's] poems are methodical, carefully built, heady . . . gently sarcastic, and very good . . . But, Pinsky also suggests with no small amount of irony and wit in this prescient book, we've left bread crumbs in the language to help us find our way back to sanity, if only we'll follow them." --Craig Morgan Teicher, Los Angeles Times

"Pinsky's erudite, jaunty, and finely distilled lyrics keenly consider genesis, ancestors know and concealed, enslaved and displaced, and our myriad attempts to define the cosmos and ourselves. Pinsky offers cunningly piquant catalog poems: biblical, skeptical, whimsical litanies of our endeavors and failures, from language itself to myth, religion, dance, jazz, and comic strips to war and environmental decimation as we spin round in perpetual desire and denial." --Donna Seaman, Booklist

"In his latest offering, Pinsky, a three-term U.S. Poet Laureate, visits a foundling hospital to discover the past. Pinsky, who started as a jazz musician, excels at figures of sound--rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, and assonance." --Library Journal

"In this ode to "Mind, mind, mind pulled/ Taut in its bony shell/ Dreaming up Heaven and Hell," Pinsky celebrates the individual imagination while complicating the idea of single point of origin or influence . . . Relatively spare poems offer sweeping meditations on history." --Publisher's Weekly

About the Author

Robert Pinsky is the author of several books of poetry, including Gulf Music, Jersey Rain, The Want Bone, and The Figured Wheel. His bestselling translation of The Inferno of Dante sets a modern standard. He was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1997 to 2000. Among his awards and honors are the William Carlos Williams Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the PEN/Voelcker Award, the Korean Manhae Prize, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the PEN American Center. He teaches in the graduate creative writing program at Boston University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0374158118
• ISBN 13: 9780374158118
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 80