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 Explanationof 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.'

Prizes

Short-listed for Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 1997

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 works include The Life of David, an account of the Biblical hero. A three-time Poet Laureate of the United States, Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project; the project's most recent anthology is An Invitation to Poetry which includes a DVD featuring Americans reading and talking about beloved poems. His works about poetry include The Sounds of Poetry and Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry, based on his Tanner Lectures on Human Values, at Princeton University. Pinsky is the poetry editor of the online magazine Slate and teaches in the graduate creative writing program at Boston University. His work has appeared in Carcanet's two Five AmericanPoets anthologies, in 1979 and in 2010.He has appeared as himself in the animated sitcom The Simpsons.