You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This adventurous and challenging anthology, compiled by three-time United States Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, presents fascinating moments of psychological intensity expressed in accomplished poetry. Such diverse emotions as love, grief, rage, guilt, shame, and manic laughter, as well as struggles of passion and reason, sanity and irrationality, extreme imagination, and humor and fright are presented—and through the power of language made shareable. Each pronounced psychological state is explored by poems that range in time from long ago to contemporaneity—from Fulke-Greville, Sappho, and Dante, for example, to current writers—and thereby manage to involve rhythmic, tonal, stylistic, and even socio-historical changes, too. Yet an insistent recognition offered to the reader, other than the delight and invitation to understand and experience absorbing poetry, is the ranging complication and wonder of the human mind—made possible, of course, by expressive language as well as by notably persistent continuities of humanity through time.
Deriving the book's title from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mr. Pinsky keeps “cliffs of fall” in sight while exploring the shapes and kinds of extreme feelings in these intriguing poems. Thereby, he also introduces a reader to a good number of talented current poets. I, at least, did not know the work of many of them and am grateful for the opportunity to learn of and appreciate their work. Not that I understood every poem—but the mind, we know, is adept at meanings and mysteries, and the range of aesthetic, uniquely experienced moments offered here is impressive.
Most of the poems are briefly and perceptively introduced by Mr. Pinsky; others, also perceptively, by his associate, Laura Marris. Certain poems, of course, have long proved memorable, and lines linger; from Walt Whitman's elegy for Abraham Lincoln, for example: