At the Foundling Hospital
Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“Since the death of Robert Lowell in 1977, no single figure has dominated American poetry the way that Lowell, or before him Eliot, once did . . . But among the many writers who have come of age in our fin de siècle, none have succeeded more completely as poet, critic, and translator than Robert Pinsky.” —James Longenbach, The Nation
With all the generosity and mastery we have come to expect from out three-time Poet Laureate, 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 mortal 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.
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In this ode to "Mind, mind, mind pulled/ Taut in its bony shell/ Dreaming up Heaven and Hell," Pinsky (Gulf Music) celebrates the individual imagination while complicating the idea of single point of origin or influence. He highlights moments of cultural cross-pollination: "I find that Creole work more glorious than God." And in this case, "Creole" refers to ancient French, Spanish, and German, the result of the Roman Empire's broad range: "Begetting and trading, they/ Had to swap, blend and improvise language." Relatively spare poems offer sweeping meditations on history, often tracing words and phrases as they morph over centuries and continents. Names are "arbitrary but also essential," Pinsky writes, "With one same meaning: The meaning of the past,/ A thunder cloud." Several poems graft historical and cultural legacies onto the life of the individual, and cull from autobiography: "Pinsky like Tex' or Brooklyn' is a name/ Nobody would have if they were still in that same place: those names all// signify someone who's been away from home a while." These history-rooted poems recognize that flux between peoples is a fundamental agent of human development and resonate with contemporary questions about migration. Pinsky's slim volume opens a narrow window through which the reader considers inheritances from the familial to the civilizational.
