POETRY IN REVIEW

Abstract

1 7 7 R P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W S T E P H E N Y E N S E R As the engaged reader discovers gradually and with increasing pleasure, Robert Pinsky’s new volume of poems, richly titled At the Foundling Hospital, delicately but persistently works in two ways at once. At the same time that it is a series of di√erent kinds of what we casually call ‘‘lyric’’ poems, it is a constellation of musings on a number of subtly related motifs. Among these motifs are foundlings, slaves, ancestors, musical instruments, shells, threads and other filaments and filiations, names – all surprisingly reticulated terms, a little, ultimately uncontainable lexical tribe – and (almost inevitably) language itself, especially in its etymological dimension. Pinsky is a master of his trade, one of the few living American poets who deserves that appellation. His individual compositions are prosodically firm and limber, whether in loose blank verse, longer six-to-seven-foot lines in distichs, tercets of four to five feet, or slant-rhymed couplets. He can craft a narrative, taut (‘‘Radioman ’’) or vagarious (‘‘The City’’), invent a song (‘‘The Orphan A t t h e Fo u n d l i n g H o s p i t a l : P o e m s , by Robert Pinsky (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 80 pp., $23) 1 7 8 Y E N S E R Y Quadrille,’’ ‘‘Genesis’’), deftly translate a traditional sonnet (‘‘Góngora : Life Is Brief,’’ after the Spanish poet’s ‘‘Menos solicitó veloz saeta’’), make a mercurial dramatic monologue (‘‘Mixed Chorus’’), eulogize a kind of musician (‘‘Horn’’), relate local history (‘‘The Foundling Tokens’’), and noodle on locutions (‘‘Improvisation on Yiddish’’). His signature mode is meditation that incorporates thoughtful, often aphoristic, and sometimes humorous observation on matters of general interest, crisp description, and vivid anecdote – and conjures Horace in its perspicuity and geniality. The result of the motifs binding this variety together is insistently a text, a term that stems from the Indo-European etymon teks-, which signified a fabrication, a thing made of fabric, specifically of wattle, comprising tree branches interlaced with boughs, tendrils, twigs, and the like (to be covered with clay and used as a shelter or domicile), fashioned in the first place by an ax. The first image of a fabric is on the dust jacket, a direful photograph comporting with the title, which shows, under a baby’s chubby, soiled hand, a coarsely woven cloth. The visual image of the fabric reappears as the frontispiece and then again at the other end of the book on a free rear endpaper (customarily blank), so that the connection with the traditional clothbound book and its relationship in turn to a shelter, the title’s hospital, are both reinforced. A poem near the end of the volume wittily intimates that fabrication’s association with this particular poet. Pinsky, a noted jazz aficionado who has performed poems in concert with the musicians Vijay Ayer, Bobby Bradford, and others, used to play jazz saxophone, an instrument celebrated in detail in ‘‘Horn,’’ where it is given its sobriquet ‘‘axe.’’ The hardly noticeable little link is not coincidental. When in the same poem Pinsky speculates that the ‘‘hack journeyman hornman’’ he memorializes along with his instrument had been tutored by ‘‘righteous / Teachers, his dentist, optician,’’ he recalls the volume’s third poem, ‘‘Creole,’’ which informs us that as a young man his father applied for a position as ‘‘apprentice optician,’’ a designation he supposed at the time meant ‘‘a kind of dentistry,’’ and subsequently adapted and learned how to grind lenses and sell glasses. Milford Pinsky’s son’s vocation has also turned out to have to do with seeing, as well as with improvisation and music. Names of vocations, instruments, people, and indeed peoples P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W 1 7 9 R are everywhere crucial. Throughout the poems, di√erent kinds of foundlings, or orphans, those without or in need of proper names, turn up, as do words related to hospital. Today we (meaning philologists like Calvert Watkins...