Dante Alighieri

Dante

Robert Pinsky

Nicole Pinsky

A translation of the classic poem about man's spiritual journey

A New Verse Translation, Bilingual Edition

The Inferno of Dante

America's Poet Laureate offers a journey inside the world of poetry to explore the fundamental workings of this literary art, explaining how different sounds can be used to express meaning and images

A Brief Guide

The Sounds of Poetry

A former poet laureate provides informative introductions and sidebar notes for more than 80 poems by greats including William Butler Yeats, Emily Dickinson and George Herbert, in an effort to spark pleasure in reading and writing poems. Reprint.

Learning to Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying with the Masters

Singing School

From Sadness and Happiness: Poems by Robert Pinsky: CEREMONY FOR ANY BEGINNING Robert Pinsky ? Against weather, and the random Harpies--mood, circumstance, the laws Of biography, chance, physics-- The unseasonable soul holds forth, Eager for form as a renowned Pedant, the emperor's man of worth, Hereditary arbiter of manners. Soul, one's life is one's enemy. As the small children learn, what happens Takes over, and what you were goes away. They learn it in sardonic soft Comments of the weather, when it sharpens The hard surfaces of daylight: light Winds, vague in direction, like blades Lavishing their brilliant strokes All over a wrecked house, The nude wallpaper and the brute Intelligence of the torn pipes. Therefore when you marry or build Pray to be untrue to the plain Dominance of your own weather, how it keeps Going even in the woods when not A soul is there, and how it implies Always that separate, cold Splendidness, uncouth and unkind-- On chilly, unclouded mornings, Torrential sunlight and moist air, Leafage and solid bark breathing the mist.

Poems

Sadness and Happiness

The Figured Wheel fully collects the first four books of poetry, as well as twenty-one new poems, by Robert Pinsky, the former U.S. Poet Laureate. Critic Hugh Kenner, writing about Pinsky's first volume, described this poet's work as "nothing less than the recovery for language of a whole domain of mute and familiar experience." Both the transformation of the familiar and the uttering of what has been hitherto mute or implicit in our culture continue to be central to Pinsky's art. New poems like "Avenue" and "The City Elegies" envision the urban landscape's mysterious epitome of human pain and imagination, forces that recur in "Ginza Samba," an astonishing history of the saxophone, and "Impossible to Tell," a jazz-like work that intertwines elegy with both the Japanese custom of linking-poems and the American tradition of ethnic jokes. A final section of translations includes Pinsky's renderings of poems by Czeslaw Milosz, Paul Celan, and others, as well as the last canto of his award-winning version of the Inferno.

New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996

The Figured Wheel

Maggie Dietz

A collection of favorite poems sent in by thousands of Americans, with selections ranging from Shakespeare to Allen Ginsberg, includes comments from normal readers on how the poems affect them.

The Favorite Poem Project Anthology

Americans' Favorite Poems

A former poet laureate provides informative introductions and sidebar notes for more than 80 poems by greats including William Butler Yeats, Emily Dickinson and George Herbert, in an effort to spark pleasure in reading and writing poems. 13,000 first printing.

Singing School: Learning to Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying with the Masters

Dollars, dolors. Callings and contrivances. King Zulu. Comus. Sephardic ju-ju and verses. Voodoo mojo, Special Forces. Henry formed a group named Professor Longhair and his Shuffling Hungarians. After so much renunciation And invention, is this the image of the promised end? All music haunted by all the music of the dead forever. Becky haunted forever by Pearl the daughter she abandoned For love, O try my tra-la-la, ma la belle, mah walla-woe. —from "Gulf Music" An improvised, even desperate music, yearning toward knowledge across a gulf, informs Robert Pinsky's first book of poetry since Jersey Rain (2000). On the large scale of war or the personal scale of family history, in the movements of people and cultures across oceans or between eras, these poems discover connections between things seemingly disparate. Gulf Music is perhaps the most ambitious, politically impassioned, and inventive book by this major American poet.

Gulf Music

David Lehman

Presents an anthology of one hundred top-selected poems culled from the poetry publication's first quarter century, and offers insight into the art form's flourishing status.

25th Anniversary Edition

Best of the Best American Poetry

Poetry at the Extremes of Feeling

Mind Has Cliffs of Fall

Selects some of the best poetry by a three-time former U.S. poet laureate and winner of the William Carlos Williams Prize. By the author of Gulf Music.

Selected Poems

Presents a collection of favorite poems sent in by thousands of Americans, with selections ranging from William Blake to Allen Ginsberg, includes comments from readers on how the poems affect them.

A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology

Poems to Read

Awarded the William Carlos Williams Prize. First published in 1984, Pinsky's History includes parents and boyhood neighbors, Fats Waller warming the Christmas crowd at Macy's, Holocaust victims and inspired derelicts. Pinsky has a rare gift for action, character, and atmosphere clearly and buoyantly proportioned. --Roland Flint, The New York Times Book Review "The Figured Wheel" is a mad, brilliant vortex that draws into itself gods, men, art, rags and bones, atoms and dust. Simply reading the poem is breathtaking; it starts its uninterruptible progression, gradually gaining speed and power, and ends in a violent giant step over self and art. It is in every sense a stunning and dangerous poem. --Joan Todden Keefe, San Francisco Chronicle.

History of My Heart

Cate Marvin

Winner of the 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in poetry, judged by Robert Pinsky.

World's Tallest Disaster

A book-and-audio set features poems that emphasize the attentive, intuitive, and reflective process of listening to poetry, in a collection that organizes works under such themes as "Short Lines, Frequent Rhymes" and "Odes, Complaints, and Celebrations."

A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud

Essential Pleasures

"Truly the voice of the Jersey Shore." —Bruce Springsteen In late-1940s Long Branch, a historic but run-down Jersey Shore resort town, in a neighborhood of Italian, Black, and Jewish families, Robert Pinsky began his unlikely journey to becoming a poet. Descended from a bootlegger grandfather, an athletic father, and a rebellious tomboy mother, Pinsky was an unruly but articulate high school C student, whose obsession with the rhythms and melodies of speech inspired him to write. Pinsky traces the roots of his poetry, with its wide and fearless range, back to the voices of his neighborhood, to music and a distinctly American tradition of improvisation, with influences including Mark Twain and Ray Charles, Marianne Moore and Mel Brooks, Emily Dickinson and Sid Caesar, Dante Alighieri and the Orthodox Jewish liturgy. He reflects on how writing poetry helped him make sense of life’s challenges, such as his mother’s traumatic brain injury, and on his notable public presence, including an unprecedented three terms as United States poet laureate. Candid, engaging, and wry, Jersey Breaks offers an intimate self-portrait and a unique poetic understanding of American culture.

Jersey Breaks: Becoming an American Poet

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is one of the most important and innovative figures of the European Middle Ages. Writing his Comedy (the epithet 'Divine' was added by later admirers) in exile from his native Florence, he aimed to address a world gone astray both morally and politically. At the same time, he sought to push back the restrictive rules which traditionally governed writing in the Italian vernacular, to produce a radically new and all-encompassing work. The Comedy tells the story of the journey of a character who is at one and the same time both Dante himself and Everyman. In the Inferno, Dante's protagonist - and his reader - is presented with a graphic vision of the dreadful consequences of sin, and encounters an all-too-human array of noble, grotesque, beguiling, ridiculous and horrific characters.

From the 39th poet laureate comes the universal prescription for a broken heart. Robert Pinsky has gathered together magical words of heart-mending solace from across the centuries to read in times of trouble. With an introduction by Pinsky, this unique volume includes the works of an astounding range of poets -- William Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath, Frank Bidart, Wallace Stevens, Frank O'hara, Louise Gluck, W.B. Yeats, Langston Hughes, and Emily Dickenson, amoung others. A timeless treasure to give or get, The Handbook of Heartbreak beats with the power of emotional truth; a must for anyone who has ever loved -- and lost.

101 Poems of Lost Love and Sorrow

The Handbook of Heartbreak

Bilingual Edition English / Spanish "Robert Pinsky in Spanish is at once a fantastic desire and a human feat. The process of re-presenting any poet's words in another language and culture entails a dual venture, both passionate and miraculous in nature. I invite you to enjoy these poems; they combine in a unique and cosmopolitan manner the mischiefs, sonic and linguistic licenses, the unexpected movement and the modes of understanding and expression, and they situate us in our universe of peace and violence, justice and injustice, faith and beauty, life and death, in the simple complexity of who we were, are now, and should be as individuals and as a community." -Luis Alberto Ambroggio "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." -Robert Lowell

Ginza Samba

In this book Robert Pinsky writes about contemporary poetry as it reflects its modernist and Romantic past. He isolates certain persistent ideas about poetry's situation relative to life and focuses on the conflict the poet faces between the nature of words and poetic forms on one side, and the nature of experience on the other. The author ranges for his often surprising examples from Keats to the great modernists such as Stevens and Williams, to the contents of recent magazines. He considers work by Ammons, Ashbery, Bogan, Ginsberg, Lowell, Merwin, O'Hara, and younger writers, offering judgments and enthusiasms from a viewpoint that is consistent but unstereotyped. Like his poetry, Robert Pinsky's criticism joins the traditional and the innovative in ways that are thoughtful and unmistakably his own. His book is a bold essay on the contemporary situation in poetry, on the dazzling achievements of modernism, and on the nature or "situation" of poetry itself.

Robert Pinsky

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