Impassioned, Personal Poems From America's Poet Laureate "It spends itself regardless into the ocean. It stains and scours and makes things dark or bright: Sweat of the moon, a shroud of benediction, The chilly liquefaction of day to night, The Jersey rain, my rain, soaks all as one: It smites Metuchen, Rahway, Saddle River, Fair Haven, Newark, Little Silver, Bayonne. I feel it churning even in fair weather To craze distinction, dry the same...

""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 The poems in Robert Pinsky's At the Foundling Hospital consider personality and culture as improvised from loss: a creative...

From An Explanation of America: LAIR Robert Pinsky Inexhaustible, delicate, as if Without source or medium, daylight Undoes the mind; the infinite, Empty actual is too bright, Scattering to where the road Whispers, through a mile of woods … Later, how quiet the house is: Dusk-like and refined, The sweet Phoebe-note Piercing from the trees; The calm globe of the morning, Things to read or to write Ranged on a table; the...

A translation of the classic poem about man's spiritual journey.