It may be, as William Carlos Williams observed, that "the pure products of America go crazy." But Robert Pinsky in his ambitious and immensely likable long poem, "An Explanation of America," sets out to counter that impression by imagining a being capable of living sanely among American dreams of speed and space…. The tone of the poem, blank verse throughout, is inquiring and grave, though what one remembers are the opportunities it gives the father to play through a repertory of American fantasies from "Deep Throat" through dreams of plenty or solitude…. Mr. Pinsky's is a salutary tightrope act. Teaching his child to live among the detritus and accidental grandeurs of American life, he is himself at times seduced by the betrayed lyric visions behind the chaos….

Mr. Pinsky's boldest stroke is to place among his exhibits his own fine translation of the whole of Horace's famous epistle which asks "Who is 'the good man'?" It sits well in a poem concerned with how to live under an empire….

Horace was the poet of transitions, never dividing common from heroic, a master of alternatives because he was a master of all levels of style and speech. This is Mr. Pinsky's strategy in "An Explanation of America" and it most often works. He will follow out one of the national myths expansively, admiringly, adopting its diction, but pursuing it as well to its bitter consequences…. We are all deadened by … pointless violence, and that is Mr. Pinsky's ultimate concern: the tincture, the erosion of American expectation and response….

Still, the poem touches its highest point in reminding his daughter not only of possibilities but of something as potent as Wallace Stevens's vocabulary of poverty and change…. This is the poet at his elegiac best, in a poem which—a rare thing—seems to combine intimacy and authority. (p. 15)