Thursday, August 17, 2017

ROBERT PINSKY

Robert Pinsky, At the Foundling Hospital: Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016) (From the book jacket: "Robert Pinsky has written a bold, lyrical meditation on identity and culture as hybrid and fluid, violent as well  as creative: the enigmatic, maybe universal, condition of the foundling. At the Foundling Hospital considers the foundling soul: its need to be adopted, and its need to be adaptive. These poems reimagine identity on the scale of one life or of human history: from 'the emanation of a dead star still alive' to the 'pinhole iris of your eye.'  "What is a particular person? How unique? What is anyone born as? Born with? Born into? The poems of Robert Pinsky's At the Foundling Hospital engage personality and culture as improvised from loss: a creative effort so pervasive it can be invisible.").