Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #134975 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-30
• Released on: 2008-09-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780374531478
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The gulf in the title of Pinsky's seventh collection is both the large southern body of water that has been the site of so much weather-related misery, and the unavoidable distances between an author's thoughts and feelings and his expression. Poems from the first section frequently butt up against subjects too large for speech, and break down into music and mystery. The title poem begins with a devastating hurricane in Galveston in 1900 and reaches after fragments and song to recall what was lost: O try my tra-la-la, ma la belle, mah wallah-woe. Another poem describes the ecstasy of forgetting, in which an enraptured audience at once hears and doesn't hear what it's being told. Pinsky (Jersey Rain) describes solid things in the second section, though he can't help noting that thing itself first meant to confer or address. Of a camera, he writes, The flash of your hammer/ Fashions the shelter. Signs of Pinsky's craftsmanship abound. Perhaps most laudable is that Pinsky—a former Poet Laureate and one of America's best-known poets—is not above self-criticism: in writing about peace, his last thought compares his own mind to a monkey who fires his shit in handfuls from the cage. (Oct.)
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From The Washington Post

I think that Robert Pinsky would agree that every act, event, performance and whooziwhatsis is two things at once: itself and an instruction manual on the class of phenomena to which it belongs. Thus, a badly sung song hurts our ears, but it also describes by negation the way a good song sounds. A wonderful sandwich is a deli full of good sandwiches that haven't been made yet. A leather shoe, a jewelry box, a bit of stained glass: each of these speaks to us of the ways in which it was or wasn't well made.

Pinsky has a thing about things, but then he would say that things have a thing about him. It sounds as though the joint's jumping chez Pinsky: In a Neruda-style ode to pens, he writes that a fat fountain pen wishes the poet were not himself at all but the farm boy who dropped it into a privy, just as "another pen strains to call back/ The characters of the thousand/ World languages dead since 1900,/ Curlicues, fiddleheads, brushstroke/ Splashes and arabesques:/ Footprints of extinct species." Does this sound a little busy for a jarful of inanimate objects? Not if, like Pinsky, you see the world as a "net of being," as he says elsewhere, a "rivalrous web of exterminations/ And propagating shadows."

Besides, with our sieve-like brains, we need all the help we can get. As a kid, says Pinsky in a poem called "Immature Song," he thought a concentration camp was a place where ditzy youngsters were sent to acquire focus. And grownups are no better; these poems are so shot through with references to memory loss that, after a while, it sounds like any other bodily function.

It might even be what makes us human. If you've ever tried to make out the lyrics of the garage rock classic "Louie Louie," then you'll feel right at home in the poem by the same title in which the speaker says, "I have heard of Yale but I never/ Heard of George W. Bush." Come again? In a would-be helpful note at the book's end, the poet says that a friend asked how he could make that claim, to which he answers: "What could I answer? That I liked saying I had not heard of him? That there was a time not long ago when we had not heard of him . . . ? That someday someone, indeed many people, will not have heard of him?" That's the brain for you: Today's leader of the free world is tomorrow's big fat question mark.

Meanwhile, the non-human world is taking care of business. In a deliberately unlovely poem that looks more like a dictionary entry than a lyric, Pinsky points out that the Old English word "thing" originally meant something like "council" or "conference" or "transaction," and in the note he explains that "every artifact, every natural object, with its ghostly wrapping of associations and meanings, begotten and forgotten, is a gathering of minds or contending voices: every thing is an invisible assembly."

But shouldn't a poem do a better job of telling the truth than the pen it's written with? Not necessarily, Pinsky would reply. To go back to the terminology of "Immature Song," a poem might concentrate better than a poet, but that doesn't mean it has more than a human might of the quality of what he calls "Citizenship." Even bad people write poems, as Pinsky says throughout this collection and in various ways.

The world is cruel: No wonder we're always trying to forget it. And poetry can be cruel, too, but if you take poetry away, then cruelty is what remains. Because poetry can be beautiful, too, and nowhere here more than in Pinsky's translation of Akhmatova's "Summer Garden," where the statues remember the Russian poet and she them amid the "hundreds of thousands/ Of footfalls of friends and enemies" and the "white nights of those years whisper/ About some love grand and mysterious," and everything glows like jewels lighted by an unknown source. This is one of those poems you're afraid to look at again for fear it might be less beautiful than you thought.

Of all the things that populate the world, then, both human and non-, a poem has the greatest potential to succeed or fail, which is why Pinsky can comfortably offer a piece called "Poems with Lines in Any Order" or observe, again in "Immature Song," that poems are adolescents, "confused, awkward, self-preoccupied, vaguely// Rebellious in a way that lacks practical focus, moving without/ Discipline from thing to thing." That may sound disrespectful coming from someone who was poet laureate of the United States from 1997 to 2000 (and Book World's current Poet's Choice columnist), but the best poets take neither themselves nor their work too seriously. Pinsky has been much praised -- in reviews of his work, he comes across as something just short of a divinity -- but in this book, he appears as an honest guildsman, his apron smudged by his labors, his work table piled up with the objects of his making.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

About the Author

Customer Reviews

perhaps his best
Pinsky is an amazing poet and this is a strong collection. Some of the poems were published in a chap book recently which I had already purchased awhile back. Still, the rest of the poems were so enjoyable I had to pick this up, too. If you like contemporary poetry (yeah, what does that mean?), especially with a political flavor, this may be just what you are looking for.

Music to my ears
Robert Pinsky is well known to many, having been Poet Laureate, written a book review column, appeared on the Newshour, and led the Favorite Poem Project. But how many read his poetry? In Gulf Music, Pinsky shows us what a strong poet he truly is, with a great range and all kinds of strategies for making a poem interest and delight his reader and listening audience. Truth in advertising: I have myself been a participant in Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project, one of the really great services done for poetry in our daily life that I can think of.

But look at these poems, read them out loud and listen to their melody. You can take the political poems. They do put events of our lives in perspective, and they do it well. But look at First Things to Hand--a series of poems about ordinary objects that prove anything but ordinary--a glass, a book, a jar of pens, a door--really proving what poetry and Pinsky can do. By far my favorite, found among the few translations at the end of Gulf Music (more truth in advertising: I love Latin poetry and even wrote a poem about the Latin language) is The Wave, Pinsky's translation of Virgil, Georgics III:237-244:

A breast-shaped curve of wave begins to whiten
And rise above the surface, the rolling on
Gathers and gathers until it reaches land
Huge as a mountain and crashes among the rocks

Was Virgil a contemporary poet? This is a really deft treatment and brings this little gem from the Georgics (translations of which are usually plodding and dull) up to date. This is NOT the stuff of Latin class, but something we can understand and relate to emotionally.

You might want to take a look at my earlier review of Pinsky's
Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry (The University Center for Human Values Series), where he makes a great statement about the place of poetry in our national life. But in the midst of all Pinsky's commentary and his great public argument about poetry--the 21st Century equivalent of Sidney's Defense--let's not forget what matters most: the truly fine poetry that Pinsky is creating.