Carcanet Press Logo
Quote of the Day
If it were not for Carcanet, my library would be unbearably impoverished.
Louis de Bernieres
Order by 16th December to receive books in time for Christmas. Please bear in mind that all orders may be subject to postal delays that are beyond our control.

Figured Wheel

Robert Pinsky

Figured Wheel
10% off
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (320 pages)
(Pub. Nov 1996)
9781857542981
£12.95 £11.65
  • Description
  • Excerpt
  • Author

  • The opening scene. The yellow, coal-fed fog
    Uncurling over the tainted city river,
    A young girl rowing and her anxious father
    Scavenging for corpses. Funeral meats. The clever
    Abandoned orphan. The great athletic killer
    Sulking in his tent. As though all stories began
    With someone dying.

    'Poem with Refrains'

    Welcoming Robert Pinsky's work, Robert Lowell wrote: 'it is refreshing to find a poet who is intellectually interesting and technically first-rate. Robert Pinsky belongs to that rarest category of talent, a poet-critic.'
        
    The Figured Wheel gathers together all Pinsky's poetry to date, including twenty-one new poems. The celebrated verse essay An Explanation  of America (Carcanet, 1980) remains at the heart of things; this book also includes 'Ginza Samba', an astonishing history of the saxophone; and 'Impossible to Tell', a jazz-like poem that combines elegy with the Japanese custom of linking-poems and the American tradition of ethnic jokes. Sadness and Happiness (1975), History of My Heart (1984) and The Want Bone (1990), the earlier books, are here. Also included are some of his translations of Czeslaw Milosz, Paul Celan and others, and the last canto of his version of Dante's Inferno. Pinsky combines 'abstract utterance and vivid image', Louis Martz wrote, and 'points the way toward the future of poetry'. 'Above inventors, said Pound, stand the small class of "masters", those who, apart from their own inventions, are able to assimilate and co-ordinate a large number of preceding inventions. This,' declared the Salmagundi reviewer, 'near the end of the twentieth century is what Robert Pinsky is doing.'


    Robert Pinsky was born in 1940 in Long Branch, New Jersey. His poetry books include The Figured Wheel, awarded the Lenore Marshall Prize, The Inferno of Dante, which won the Howard Morton Landon Prize in translation and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and Gulf Music . His prose ... read more
Share this...
The Carcanet Blog One Little Room: Peter McDonald read more Collected Poems: Mimi Khalvati read more Invisible Dog: Fabio Morbito, translated by Richard Gwyn read more Dante's Purgatorio: Philip Terry read more Billy 'Nibs' Buckshot: John Gallas read more Emotional Support Horse: Claudine Toutoungi read more
Find your local bookshop logo
Arts Council Logo
We thank the Arts Council England for their support and assistance in this interactive Project.
This website ©2000-2024 Carcanet Press Ltd