9780374527723
Jersey Rain
Robert Pinsky
ISBN 13: 9780374527723
Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
Publication Date: 2001
Binding: Softcover
Your Satisfaction is Guaranteed:
Innovative, engaging poems from a leading American poet.
Stone wheel that sharpens the blade that mows the grain,
Wheel of the sunflower turning, wheel that turns
The spiral press that squeezes the oil expressed
From shale or olives. Particles that turn mud
On the potter's wheel that spins to form the vessel
That holds the oil that drips to cool the blade.
--from "Biography"
Jersey Rain takes up a central American subject: the emotional power of inventions, devices, and homemade imaginings -- from the alphabet and the lyre through the steel drum and piano to the record player, digital computer, and television. Formally innovative and highly readable poems like "ABC," "Ode to Meaning," "To Television," and "The Green Piano" meditate a life guided by the quick, artful tinkerer-god Hermes: deity of music and deception, escort of the dead, inventor of instruments, brilliant messenger, and trickster of heaven.
Review:
"[Pinsky] has become Yeats's '60-year-old smiling public man,' almost to the year....But the tasks of the public poet usually suit him well, because his intelligence seems, at bottom, less lyrical than discursive, even didactic. This poetic mode is much less favored now than in the past, but as Pinsky proves, it is still able to give pleasure....The pleasure comes less from the poet's perfection as an artifact than from our sense of the poet's sensitive, inquisitive mind at work."
Adam Kirsch, New York Times Book Review, 04/09/2000
Review:"The poems reveal how seemingly commonplace objects hold deeper "messages." Yet these poems are not confined by their personal narratives; rather, Pinsky's contemplation of the recesses of his mind and the fabric of his subjective history has the power to yield insights into the machinations of the human mind in general in its attempt to find, project, and maintain meaning."
David Clippinger, Harvard Review, Fall 2000
Jersey Rain: Search Results
| 1. |
Jersey Rain: Poems (ISBN: 0374527725 / 0-374-52772-5) Pinsky, Robert Quantity Available: 1
Book Description: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. Paperback. Book Condition: New. Bookseller Inventory # mon0000134613 Bookseller & Payment Information | More Books from this Seller | Ask Bookseller a Question |
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Jersey Rain: Poems (Paperback) (ISBN: 9780374527723) Pinsky, Robert Quantity Available: 1
Book Description: Farrar Straus Giroux, United States, 2001. Paperback. Book Condition: New. Brand New Book with Free Worldwide Delivery. Bookseller Inventory # AAC9780374527723 Bookseller & Payment Information | More Books from this Seller | Ask Bookseller a Question |
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| 3. |
Jersey Rain Poems (ISBN: 0374527725 / 0-374-52772-5) Pinsky, Robert Quantity Available: 1
Book Description: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York Usa, 2001. Softcover. Book Condition: New. Marfree, acidfree fresh prtg; no names, not marked-in, underscored, clearance or discard. Mails from NYC usually within 12 hours. ; 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.2 inches; 52 pages; \nFrom Publishers Weekly Despite the Springsteen-esque title, the same phrasal gifts that drive 1996's new and collected volume, The Figured Wheel, and Pinsky's acclaimed translation of the Inferno, are well-displayed in this slim, sixth collection. Unfortunately, most of the poems' occasions and insights don't quite measure up to the rhetorical firepower turned upon them. The hortatory mode dominates the collection: "To the Phoenix" begins, "Dark herald, self-conceived in the desert waste, / What yang or yin enfolds your enigma best?" Invoking Prufrock, the body as "Vessel" is implored "O veteran immersed from toe to crown, // Buoy the population of the soul/ Toward their destination before they drown. " "A Phonebook Cover Hermes of the Nineteen-forties" features "Fire zigzag in his grasp, labeled 'Spirit/ Of Communication'--unhistorical, / Pure, the merciless messenger. " There is pleasure in the sheer muscle of these constructions, and it's clear that the poet's archaisms are within his control. Yet the name-checks--of Oprah, Ecco press editor Daniel Halpern and others--grow tiresome, and the stabs at intimacy are tinged with a neo-Lowellian obsession with guilt and grandeur. One can't help reading pretentious references to Pinsky's duties as U. S. Poet laurate into an "Autumn Quartet" (written "On my birthday") , which calls on "the heros of antiquity /To pass their lonely double knowledge on/ To such as Odysseus, who learned to tell the story/ Of his life, couched in as many lies as needed. / Among the epic bravos, a civic man. " The prose centerpiece, "An Alphabet of My Dead, " brings in family, a student suicide, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's Oxford Book of English Verse and "Plural dead in categories like counting sheep, the exterminated Jews of Europe, the obliviated Kallikaks of New Jersey " among others. "To Television, " "The Green Piano" and other lighter pieces will delight fans, but the poems with more profound aspirations lack a penetrating introspection. Copyright 2000 Reed. From Library Jour: Pinsky has several careers within the realm of literature: poet, translator, and public advocate of poetry. All of these influences can be felt in his new collection, which is the first assembly of his own lyric verse to appear since The Want Bone (The Figured Wheel served as a Collected Earlier Poems) . At times, his poems reach for the extra-personal, the mythic or abstract, as in "The Knight's Prayer" or "To the Phoenix"; at others, they move through personal or confessional modes, as in "An Alphabet of My Dead" or "To Television. " Pinsky seems most comfortable with the gnomic or elevated phrase: "The shifting hero wanders alien places, / Through customs of cities and histories of races, / Recollects, travels and summons together all--/ All manners of the dead and living, in the great Hall. " Occasionally, his differing manners collide strangely, but Pinsky delivers, as ever, intelligent, pensive poetry of great beauty. For most collections. -Graham Christian, formerly with Andover-Harvard Theological Lib. , Cambridge, MA Copyright 2000 Reed. Bookseller Inventory # 19073 Bookseller & Payment Information | More Books from this Seller | Ask Bookseller a Question |
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Jersey Rain: Poems (ISBN: 9780374527723) Pinsky, Robert Quantity Available: 8
Book Description: FARRAR STRAUS and GIROUX, 2001. Paperback. Book Condition: New. New book. Shipped from US. Bookseller Inventory # IB-9780374527723 Bookseller & Payment Information | More Books from this Seller | Ask Bookseller a Question |
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Jersey Rain (ISBN: 0374527725 / 0-374-52772-5) Pinsky, Robert Quantity Available: 10
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Jersey Rain: Poems (ISBN: 9780374527723) Pinsky, Robert Quantity Available: 8
Book Description: FARRAR STRAUS and GIROUX, 2001. Paperback. Book Condition: New. New book. Shipped from US. Bookseller Inventory # IB-9780374527723 Bookseller & Payment Information | More Books from this Seller | Ask Bookseller a Question |
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Jersey Rain: Poems (ISBN: 9780374527723) Pinsky, Robert Quantity Available: 7
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Jersey Rain (ISBN: 0374527725 / 0-374-52772-5) Pinsky, Robert Quantity Available: 1
Book Description: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2001. Paper Back. Book Condition: New. Bookseller Inventory # 20070607107018 Bookseller & Payment Information | More Books from this Seller | Ask Bookseller a Question |
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| 9. |
Jersey Rain: Poems (ISBN: 9780374527723) Pinsky, Robert Quantity Available: 8
Book Description: Farrar Straus Giroux. Paperback / softback. Book Condition: new. BRAND NEW, Jersey Rain: Poems, Robert Pinsky, Cathartic, refreshing new work by the American favorite"Tiptoe on the globe. Gazing""nowhere in particular, the slender""Thunderer surrounded by thunder, ""Fire zigzag in his grasp, labeled "Spirit""Of Communication"---unhistorical, ""Pure, the merciless messenger."--from "A Phonebook Cover Hermes of the Nineteen-forties"Innovative, engaging poems from a leading American poet.Stone wheel that sharpens the blade that mows the grain, Wheel of the sunflower turning, wheel that turnsThe spiral press that squeezes the oil expressedFrom shale or olives. Particles that turn mudOn the potter's wheel that spins to form the vesselThat holds the oil that drips to cool the blade.--from "Biography"Jersey Rain takes up a central American subject: the emotional power of inventions, devices, and homemade imaginings -- from the alphabet and the lyre through the steel drum and piano to the record player, digital computer, and television. Formally innovative and highly readable poems like "ABC," "Ode to Meaning," "To Television," and "The Green Piano" meditate a life guided by the quick, artful tinkerer-god Hermes: deity of music and deception, escort of the dead, inventor of instruments, brilliant messenger, and trickster of heaven."Tiptoe on the globe."" Gazing""nowhere in particular, the slender""Thunderer surrounded by thunder, ""Fire zigzag in his grasp, labeled "Spirit""Of Communication"---unhistorical, ""Pure, the merciless messenger."--from "A Phonebook Cover Hermes of the Nineteen-forties""Jersey Rain" -- at once complex and aboveboard -- marks a new, strong, lyrical stage of Robert Pinsky's work. Assembled here are poems -- some of the finest of his career -- that together compose a sweeping andembattled meditation on the themes of a life guided by Hermes: deity of music and deception, escort of the dead, inventor of instruments, brilliant messenger and trickster of heaven. Bookseller Inventory # B9780374527723 Bookseller & Payment Information | More Books from this Seller | Ask Bookseller a Question |
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Jersey Rain : Poems (ISBN: 0374527725 / 0-374-52772-5) Pinsky, Robert Quantity Available: 1
Book Description: Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 2001. Trade Paperback. Book Condition: New. First Edition. First Printing of the stated First Paperback Edition. Condition: New. Bookseller Inventory # 003316 Bookseller & Payment Information | More Books from this Seller | Ask Bookseller a Question |
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