Remarkable. . . . What [these poems] are attempting is important: nothing less than the recovery for language of a whole domain of mute and familiar experience.DLHugh Kenner, The Los Angeles Times Book Review It is refreshing to find a poet who is intellectually interesting and technically first-rate. Robert Pinsky belongs to that rarest category of talents, a poet- critic.DLRobert Lowell The pleasures of Pinsky . . . are the unfashionable, or at least the unfamiliar, ones of sanity, the cool entertainment of alternatives, and the conviction . . . that speech . . . is not only interesting but shares with both lyric and nonsense a certainty of resonance. . . .DLRichard Howard, Poetry
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ReviewsEditorial Review - Kirkus Reviews Copyright (c) VNU Business Media, Inc.
You may not be able to tell a book by its cover, but beware the title. This poet, for all his credentials (he's published in various prestigious ""little magazines"") never uses a metaphor when a lazy simile can be found, writes five words where one would suffice, and avoids new descriptions when old ones can be recycled (""shrewd Odysseus""!). He apostrophizes (""Soul, one's life is one's enemy ...
More""), he personalizes (""The sky reaches down""), he lists, he repeats, he lists, he repeats. . . like a good professor, he never says something once. The devices apart, he is irretrievably banal: ""I am quite sure that I have read somewhere/ That the rate of suicide among psychiatrists/ Is far higher than for any other profession.// There are many myths to explain such things, things/ Which one reads and believes without believing/ Any one significance for them--as in this case,// Which again reminds me of writers, who, I have read,/ Drink and become alcoholics and die of alcoholism/ In far greater numbers than other people."" No illumination, grace, or wit (one fine exception, ""The Destruction of Long Branch""), merely line divisions of ""sentences too flat for any poems.
Less User Review - Poetry
The pleasures of Pinsky. . . . are the unfashionable, or at least the unfamiliar, ones of sanity, the cool entertainment of alternatives, and the conviction. . . that speech. . . is not only interesting but shares with both lyric and nonsense a certainty of resonance. . . . Write reviewReferences from web pages【楽天市場】Sadness and Happiness: Poems by Robert Pinsky：楽天 ...
Sadness and Happiness: Poems by Robert Pinsky（Sadness and Happiness: Poems by Robert ... タイトル：Sadness and Happiness: Poems by Robert Pinsky：SADNESS ...
item.rakuten.co.jp/ book/ 4534974/ Pinsky, Robert : 本 | シンプルアマゾン 通販
Sadness and Happiness: Poems (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets) Sadness and Happiness: Poems (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets) (詳細) ...
1sas.net/ books/ 94740011/ References to this bookFrom other books | by Janna Malamud Smith
Snippet view - 1997
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Popular passages... apart. When they fell apart, poets were left With emotions and experiences, and with no way To examine them. At this time, poets and men Of genius began to go mad. Gray went mad. Collins Went mad. Kit Smart was mad. William Blake surely Was a madman. Coleridge was a drug addict, with severe Depression. My friend Hart Crane died mad. My friend Ezra Pound is mad. But you will not go mad; you will grow up To become happy, sentimental old college professors... Page 72 Anti-semi tic bully, swimming across The river raked by nazi fire, The awful part is the part truth: Hate my whole kind, but me, Love me for myself. The weather Changes in the black of night, And the dream-wind, bowling across The sopping open spaces Of roads, golf-courses, parking lots, Flails a commotion In the dripping treetops, Tries a half-rotten shingle Or a down-hung branch, and we All dream it, the dark wind crossing The wide spaces between us. Page 4 ... happened to you today, organizing life — not you too dust like the poets, dancers, athletes, their dear skills and the alleged glittering gaiety of Art which, in my crabwise scribbling hand, no less than Earth the change of all changes breedeth, art and life both inconstant mothers, in whose fixed cold bosoms we lie fixed, desperate to devise anything, any sadness or happiness, only to escape the clasped coffinworm truth of eternal art or marmoreal infinite nature, twin stiff destined measures... Page 28 In this poem, the bond between man and woman is to "alleviate,/ The weather, the time of year, the time of day. Page 5 Watching the kinds of people On the street for a while — But how love falters and flags When anyone's difficult eyes come Into focus, terrible gaze of a unique Soul, its need unlovable: my friend In his divorced schoolteacher Apartment, his own unsuspected Paintings hung everywhere, Which his wife kept in a closet — Not, he says, that she wasn't Perfectly right; or me, mis-hearing My rock radio sing my self-pity: "The Angels Wished Him Dead... Page 4 Old Woman Not even in darkest August, When the mysterious insects Marry loudly in the black weeds And the woodbine, limp after rain, In the cooled night is more fragrant, Do you gather in any slight Harvest to yourself. Deep whispers Of slight thunder, horizons off, May break your thin sleep, but awake, You cannot hear them. Page 33 Shrink" is a misnomer. The religious Analogy is all wrong, too, and the old, Half-forgotten jokes about Viennese accents And beards hardly apply to the good-looking woman In boots and a knit dress, or the man Seen buying the Sunday Times in mutton-chop Whiskers and expensive jogging shoes. In a way I suspect that even the terms "doctor" And "therapist" are misnomers; the patient Is not necessarily "sick. Page 57 First Early Mornings Together Waking up over the candy store together We hear birds waking up below the sill And slowly recognize ourselves, the weather, The time, and the birds that rustle there until Down to the street as fog and quiet lift The pigeons from the wrinkled awning flutter To reconnoiter, mutter, stare and shift Pecking by ones or twos the rainbowed gutter. Page 36 Essaying to distinguish these men and women, Who try to give medicine for misery, From the rest of us, I find I have failed To discover what essential statement could be made About psychiatrists that would not apply To all human beings, or what statement About all human beings would not apply Equally to psychiatrists. Page 75 LessContents | 38 | | | | | 41 | | | | Section 13 | 42 | | | | | 47 | | | | Section 15 | 48 | | | | | 49 | | | | Section 17 | 50 | | | | Section 18 | 51 | | | |
MoreOther editions | by Robert Pinsky
Limited preview - 1975
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