Pinsky: The Want Bone (cloth) (American Poetry Series) - Hardcover

Pinsky, R

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0880012501 ISBN 13: 9780880012508

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co., 1991

Synopsis

Poems deal with the unseen presence of history, the evolution of desire, the creative genius in an ordinary shirt, the life of a diamond cutter, and the perspectives of religion

About this title

Review

..".poems as spirited and weighty, eloquent and startling, as any poet of hisgeneration can summon."-- "The New Republic"""The Want Bone" is about the conflicting and overlapping metaphysics of Judaism and Christianity, about history as an invisible presence, about the creative and destructive potential of the imagination, about the drives and powers that shape us and that we in turn transfigure into the emblems and artifacts of culture, into, say, weapons and songs, the strife and music of desire itself. lt is Robert Pinsky's riskiest and most imaginative book of poems."-- "The New York Times Book Review""His unmistakable identity as one of America's most inventive poets is even more apparent in these pages than in any of his previous books."-- "Chicago Tribune"

About the Author

Robert Pinsky was born on October 20, 1940 in Long Branch, New Jersey. He received a B.A. from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and earned both an M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow in creative writing, and studied under the poet and critic Yvor Winters .

He is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Gulf Music: Poems; Jersey Rain (2000); The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (1996), which received the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a Pulitzer Prize nominee; The Want Bone (1990); History of My Heart (1984); An Explanation of America (1980); and Sadness and Happiness (1975).

He is also the author of several prose titles, including The Life of David; Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (2002); The Sounds of Poetry (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Poetry and the World (1988); and The Situation of Poetry (1977). In 1985 he also released a computerized novel, Mindwheel.

Pinsky has published two acclaimed works of traslation: The Inferno of Dante (1994), which was a Book-of-the-Month-Club Editor's Choice, and received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award ; and The Separate Notebooks by Czeslaw Milosz (with Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass ).

About his work, the poet Louise Gluck has said, "Robert Pinsky has what I think Shakespeare must have had: dexterity combined with worldliness, the magician's dazzling quickness fused with subtle intelligence, a taste for tasks and assignments to which he devises ingenious solutions."

From 1997 to 2000, he served as the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. During that time, he founded the Favorite Poem Project, a program dedicated to celebrating, documenting and encouraging poetry's role in Americans' lives.

In 1999, he co-edited Americans' Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology with Maggie Dietz. Other anthologies he has edited include An Invitation to Poetry (W. W. Norton & Company, 2004); Poems to Read (2002); and Handbook of Heartbreak (1998).

His honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, both the William Carlos Williams Award and the Shelley Memorial prize from the Poetry Society of America, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. He is currently poetry editor of the weekly Internet magazine Slate .

Pinsky has taught at both Wellesley College and the University of California, Berkeley, and currently teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co.
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0880012501
• ISBN 13: 9780880012508
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 70