Here is my review of Robert Pinsky’s Proverbs of Limbo:
If we’re lucky and enduringly brilliant and born in 1940, we may find ourselves approaching the making of poetry with what I imagine to be the enlightened qualities that generated such longevity in the first place. We may focus less on the mind-expanding provocations of Blakean “proverbs of hell” than on richly ambivalent apothegms, morally textured and attuned to the tenuous distinctions of the world, perched somewhere between “the flames of Righteousness / And the pits of Euphemism.”
We’d know that a Seinfeld reference might feel incongruous because maybe we “live more in the fifties than the nineties,” but we’d balance our summoning of the passing slurs that a person of any identity can’t forget (Henry James likening immigrant Jews to “snakes”) or of the lost friends from our youth, like the poet Henry Dumas, “shot dead by a transit cop” in 1968, with the dynamic scope that age and wisdom can afford, “the crowd of names all stranded alive, /Ashore, outwaiting my shadowy boat.”
Such scope is beautifully realized in the poem “Soul Making,” which zooms outward to the “galactic broth” that “brews the first suns” and then inward to the “microscopic animals, flexing / Bizarre mandibles, that patrol my eyelids / And guts.” Wielding a colloquial line that acts as a delicate, sonic zoom to the eloquent pentameters of poetic tradition, like those of Hardy and Donne, Pinsky arrives at an unforced and moving connection between himself and those eyelash mites: “Darkling I too perform the turns and bits / Of my assigned proportions.”
One of the achievements of Robert Pinsky’s work has always been the way in which he balances a realistic and therefore fateful sense of life with a vivacity of expression that reflects his unabashed pleasure in the vagaries of human nature, a sense of moral and aesthetic proportion that Proverbs of Limbo splendidly exemplifies.
(Book cover, Farrar Straus Giroux.)