[Robert Pinsky's] An Explanation of America is perhaps rather less interesting than his earlier work: the air of infinitely calm and insidious rumination riding upon effortlessly digested commonplaces now has an occasionally ponderous air, lapsing too easily into boring prosiness…. Pinsky shows off his essayist side in this long poem …, his skill with the ordinary or with niceties of personal relationships in abeyance for a while. His virtues include the ability to construct a large-scale edifice of meaning and feeling without the need to cast quasi-heroic attitudes. It is this modesty of procedure which allows him, in the centre of the poem, to weigh Brutus, with Horace, political action and retirement, and he does so with a real sense of open options and meditative ease. (p. 66)