[In An Explanation of America Pinsky] organizes rigorously: a brief prefatory lyric and a concluding dedicatory elegy frame the title poem, fifty-five pages long, which divides into three parts ("Its Many Fragments," "Its Great Emptiness," "Its Everlasting Possibility"), each of which has four titled sections. The twelve sections give him an "epic" arrangement and might make us think of Milton, although Pinsky, unfashionably and polemically, sees America not as a paradise lost but as the old New World.

He means his title's audacity to give way to exactness…. Moreover, explanations can be "True or false." He never quite points out that "explanation" means "to open out, to spread out flat," but he might have. To put it one way, Pinsky levels with us. His vocabulary is large and varied but never arcane. His figures illustrate or carry forth arguments rather than lay claim to a unique sensibility. His carefully composed sentences never stray very far from the syntax of good conversation, and they need to be reread not for comprehension but for admiration of their lucidity. This heightened plain style seems as "Garrulous, prosy" in its way as his daughter's style in her essays, which he proudly characterizes in his first section…. To put all this another way consonant with the word "explanation," he unfolds and spreads out his own clearly delineated map of the country's diverse, contradictory qualities. He does so leisurely and efficiently, smoothing away wrinkles here and there even as he introduces some new wrinkle, itself to be ironed out later. (pp. 115-16)

He gives one the impression that he has any amount of territory in which to expatiate, amplify, and invent. As he makes clear later, however, he also welcomes boundaries, and his carefully measured blank verse in [some of his lines] tells us that as well. He has something in common with the carefree Brownie Leader in the … lively description of his daughter's square dance lesson: she smiles and skips through the dance, and he varies his pentameter, especially by means of that terminal anapest, until it lilts. But he must also recognize himself in another Leader, "her face exalted / By something like a passion after order."

This square dance introduces a pervasive, unobtrusive analogy. The two Leaders embody conflicting impulses within the country as well as within the verse; and if, with its "homestitched formations," the dance resembles the United States, it also resembles the poem, the unity of which depends partly on "Varying repetitions" like those in the music—as the reticulation of "idea," "children," and "explaining" in the opening lines suggests…. His manner often reminds me of those phrases in Chopin, as described by Proust, so free and flexible, which wander far from their points of departure and indulge apparently whimsical digressions only to come back to their appointed places with all the more precision. This sort of development occurs often within individual sections…. [In "Serpent Knowledge" Pinsky starts] with one detail in a zoology lesson, [and moves] across the country and back, and back and forth through centuries, and by the time he reprises the original idea, the snake with the inwardly expanding horizon has become both Leviathan and any individual citizen. Even while worrying that he cannot use certain words, including "Vietnam," because they threaten to "swallow and enclose the poem," he has made the poem a kind of serpent that can swallow anything.

In a sense it even swallows itself. "Serpent Knowledge" has its tail in its mouth…. [In "Braveries" he] tells the story of the child being born during the siege of Saguntum who looked out at the horror awaiting him and retreated to the womb to die. This legend provokes reflections on the Zero Population Growth movement, whose aim contravenes the typical American "Denial of limit" and yet expands the country's potential precisely by embracing limitation. Trying to explain his sense of this country's bounded limitlessness, he resorts to the image of a girl learning to ride, whose circular progress around the ring makes "The goods of all the world seem possible" to her adoring father. These passages lead into this section's climax, with its characteristically casual puns on "born" and "goods"—and its characteristically optimistic attitude…. It is as though he were suggesting that countries die (as Alcemon said of people) because they cannot join their ends and their beginnings and that it need not be so here. As at other points in the poem, one begins to wonder whether his explanation has not surrendered to his rhetoric. It is one thing for "Braveries" to "be born backward" and another thing for America. Echoing Gatsby's conclusion in order to correct it, these lines must nonetheless remind us of the relevance of Fitzgerald's skepticism.

But Pinsky has been there before us, and his optimism rarely narrows into naive patriotism. For one thing, just as its parts compel us to examine it as a whole—for the poem coheres in much the way that each section does, so that to pull out one strand of associations is eventually to unravel this entire "cloth / Cut shimmering from conventions of the dead"—so this explanation of America keeps turning into an explanation of the world at large…. Moreover, Pinsky's version of the American dream is shrewdly self-conscious, especially in his conclusion, where he takes the risk of letting his view of the country's future fade into the outcome of The Winter's Tale, in a college production of which his daughter played Mammilius…. [He] adopts this happy ending in the face of the realization that it "affronts belief." He even sketches the alternative conclusion, one prompted by fear rather than hope and presided over by the mountains, with their "cold and motionless remove." The more he ponders that grimmer possibility, however, the more he must acknowledge the instinct that romance formulates, the instinct that will reproduce "New Hope," if need be, even "on some stage/As bare and rarefied as the coldest mountain."… [In] the end he pays homage, not just to this country, but to the human spirit, the ineradicable "passion to make new beginnings." It is this admirable poem's final paradox that its eminently lucid "explanation" leads to an affirmation of "an authority transcending power / Or even belief." (pp. 116-19)