Gulf Music: Poems

by Robert Pinsky

Overview

Dollars, dolors. Callings and contrivances. King Zulu. Comus.

Sephardic ju-ju and verses. Voodoo mojo, Special Forces.

Henry formed a group named Professor Longhair and his

Shuffling Hungarians. After so much renunciation

And invention, is this the image of the promised end?

All music haunted by all the music of the dead forever.

Becky haunted forever by Pearl the daughter she abandoned

For love, O try my tra-la-la, ma la belle, mah walla-woe.

—from "Gulf Music"

An improvised, even desperate music, yearning toward knowledge across a gulf, informs Robert Pinsky's first book of poetry since Jersey Rain (2000).

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 between things seemingly disparate.

Gulf Music is perhaps the most ambitious, politically impassioned, and inventive book by this major American poet.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374531478
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	09/30/2008
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Robert Pinsky is the author of several books of poetry, including Gulf Music, Jersey Rain, The Want Bone, The Figured Wheel, and At the Foundling Hospital. His bestselling translation The Inferno of Dante sets a modern standard. He was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1997 to 2000. Among his awards and honors are the William Carlos Williams Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the PEN/Voelcker Award, the Korean Manhae Prize, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the PEN American Center. He teaches in the graduate creative writing program at Boston University.