Gulf Music

The gulf in the title of Pinsky's seventh collection is both the large southern body of water that has been the site of so much weather-related misery, and the unavoidable distances between an author's thoughts and feelings and his expression. Poems from the first section frequently butt up against subjects too large for speech, and break down into music and mystery. An improvised, even desperate music, yearning toward knowledge across a gulf, informs Pinsky's first book of poetry since Jersey Rain. On the large scale of war or the personal scale of family history, in the movements of people and cultures across oceans or between eras, these poems discover connections. This is perhaps the most ambitious, politically impassioned, and inventive book by this major American poet.