The Handbook of Heartbreak: 101 Poems of Lost Love and Sorrow - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 068816286X ISBN 13: 9780688162863

Publisher: William Morrow, 1998

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Pinsky was born on October 20, 1940 in Long Branch, New Jersey. He received a B.A. from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and earned both an M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow in creative writing, and studied under the poet and critic Yvor Winters .

He is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Gulf Music: Poems; Jersey Rain (2000); The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (1996), which received the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a Pulitzer Prize nominee; The Want Bone (1990); History of My Heart (1984); An Explanation of America (1980); and Sadness and Happiness (1975).

He is also the author of several prose titles, including The Life of David; Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (2002); The Sounds of Poetry (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Poetry and the World (1988); and The Situation of Poetry (1977). In 1985 he also released a computerized novel, Mindwheel.

Pinsky has published two acclaimed works of traslation: The Inferno of Dante (1994), which was a Book-of-the-Month-Club Editor's Choice, and received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award ; and The Separate Notebooks by Czeslaw Milosz (with Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass ).

About his work, the poet Louise Glück has said, "Robert Pinsky has what I think Shakespeare must have had: dexterity combined with worldliness, the magician's dazzling quickness fused with subtle intelligence, a taste for tasks and assignments to which he devises ingenious solutions."

From 1997 to 2000, he served as the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. During that time, he founded the Favorite Poem Project, a program dedicated to celebrating, documenting and encouraging poetry's role in Americans' lives.

In 1999, he co-edited Americans' Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology with Maggie Dietz. Other anthologies he has edited include An Invitation to Poetry (W. W. Norton & Company, 2004); Poems to Read (2002); and Handbook of Heartbreak (1998).

His honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, both the William Carlos Williams Award and the Shelley Memorial prize from the Poetry Society of America, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. He is currently poetry editor of the weekly Internet magazine Slate .

Pinsky has taught at both Wellesley College and the University of California, Berkeley, and currently teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Reviews

Pinsky, America's 39th poet laureate, brings together the likes of Shakespeare and Yeats, O'Hara and Plath, Hayden, Dickinson, and Komynyakaa on the theme of the broken heart. This is a collection of 101 salves and spells with the power to heal. The number of poems were chosen, as Pinsky tells us in his introduction, because it sounds lovely. "Why do works of art about bad things such as loss and deprivation make us feel good?" he asks. Every love and attachment brings risk; loss is almost inevitable. These laments mourn loves and friends, places and things; the title comes from Wallace Stevens, whose love is for the earth itself. Frost tells us that because of Eve's voice, "Never again would birds' song be the same./ And to do that to birds was why she came." Much of this volume is familiar, but the poems are strengthened by their setting. Highly recommended.?Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 068816286X
• ISBN 13: 9780688162863
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 158