Figured Wheel

This text gathers together all Robert Pinsky's poetry, including 21 new poems. The verse essay "An Explanation of America" (Carcarnet, 1980) remains at the heart of this work. The book also includes "Ginza Samba", a history of the saxophone, and "Impossible to Tell", a jazz-like poem that combines elegy with the Japanese custom of linking-poems and the American tradition of ethnic jokes. "Sadness and Happiness" (1975), "History of My Heart" (1984) and "The Want Bone" (1990). Also included are some of Pinsky's translations of Czeslaw Milosz, Paul Celan and others, and the last canto of his version of Dante's "Inferno" (1994).