The Figured Wheel. New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996.

PINSKY, Robert.

Item Number: 116341

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.

First edition of this collection of poems by the former Poet Laureate of the United States. Octavo, original half cloth. Signed by Robert Pinsky on a bookplate for the members of the the class of 1997 at Boston University. Fine in a fine fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Fritz Metsch.

The Figured Wheel fully collects the first four books of poetry, as well as twenty-one poems, by Robert Pinsky, the former U.S. Poet Laureate. Critic Hugh Kenner, writing about Pinsky's first volume, described this poet's work as "nothing less than the recovery for language of a whole domain of mute and familiar experience." Both the transformation of the familiar and the uttering of what has been hitherto mute or implicit in our culture continue to be central to Pinsky's art. New poems like "Avenue" and "The City Elegies" envision the urban landscape's mysterious epitome of human pain and imagination, forces that recur in "Ginza Samba," an astonishing history of the saxophone, and "Impossible to Tell," a jazz-like work that intertwines elegy with both the Japanese custom of linking-poems and the American tradition of ethnic jokes.