[Corn is an American poet, critic, translator, and educator. In the following highly positive review of The Want Bone, he lauds Pinsky for his "wonderful ear for poetic line" and the ways in which he examines the theme of "human wishes and the obstacles to them."]

Readers of Robert Pinsky's first two books hailed him as a new W. C. Williams, gifted at transforming the dailiness of life into a significant poetry. Realism and narrative characterized those books and continued even into the third, at least in the long title poem, "The History of My Heart." With the shorter poems in that book, though, a new approach became evident. Realism gave way to a fabular imagination, to organization by montage and association rather than by narrative or logical exposition. This is the method of almost every poem in The Want Bone as well. Realistic detail, even snippets of history appear in the poems, but only as fleeting moments in larger meditations, where they take their place among other details from quite different contexts. Unity isn't achieved through clenched teeth but makes itself felt in recurring key words, themes and contexts. As with cinematic montage, or painterly collage, we're asked to discover the synaptic connection between disparate psychological states and material phenomena. The resulting room for speculation gives the poems an oracular feel; there's nothing pat about them. The actual substantive content is made up of wildly different realia, everything from pop culture to Arthurian legend, industrial history, cabbages, kings, whatever has caught the omnivorous attention of this wide-ranging poet. In a recently published essay in David Rosenberg's Testimony (a collection of meditations on the Holocaust), Pinsky says, "The idea of civilization, at each level of intensity, is the capacity to incorporate historical forces into personal gestures." Gestures here are understood to include not only salty shrugs and winces, I think, but also those choices where a whole identity is defined. Growing up in an ethnically mixed shore town in New Jersey, Pinsky was led at an early age to reflect on the forces behind differences in speech and customs, to see how various "walks of life" were at once arbitrary and historically determined. Pinsky's Jewish identity would also have been attached at some early stage to a sense of historical injustice and tragedy, so that the habit of annotating cultural difference could never simply be a pleasant pastime.

One more effort at giving this new book a context and then a look at actual poems. The Want Bone focuses on specifically religious themes drawn from several traditions. The least convincing of these are the treatments of Christianity, for example in the poem called "From the Childhood of Jesus" and the long prose romance (for lack of a better word) titled "Jesus and Isolt." The first poem is based on the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, which even in the original form is a bit hard to take—unless one is schooled at deciphering Gnostic spiritual metaphors. As for the prose poem, Pinsky has concocted a wildly inventive blend of Christian iconography and medieval romance, sending out centrifugal thrusts of meaning in several directions; but it is long, and it is prose. Pinsky seems more confident when he composes "Memoir," a moving account of an upbringing in Orthodox Judaism (which he, not brought up that way, is nevertheless able convincingly to imagine.) Actually, Pinsky seems most at home in the Hindu tradition, which was first hinted at in a poem called "The Figured Wheel" in his previous book. It is a view of existence intently focused on multiplicity and transformation, of destruction and recreation, yesterday's ashes become new growth on the apple tree. Hence the ecstatic and frightening "Shiva and Parvati Hiding in the Rain," or the darkly imagined "The Ghost Hammer." Several of the poems stir the various traditions together, not so as to reach a syncretic amalgam but to show how they are also grist in the vast mill of mutability, spiritual conventions braided together and unraveled again through time.

Pinsky has a wonderful ear for poetic line. More than anything else that would seem to be his teacher Yvor Winters's legacy to him. Reading poems like "What Why When How Who," I found myself almost ignoring the content, so subtly overriding was the music of the lines. To pick one at random: "Improvisation framelessly from tires." Notice how the number of syllables decreases in successive words, ending with the monosyllables of the concluding iamb of the pentameter; the play of consonants m, r, and f, the long a's balanced by a concluding long i. This instance is by no means a rare exception. Over and again I stopped to admire the perfect tooling of lines and stanzas, a constantly varying sonic texture, usually iambic with the variety of living speech—proof (if we need it) that "free verse" need not occasion slack or arbitrary composition.

The title of the book and the poem with that title point to the most persistent theme: human wishes and the obstacles to them. Pinsky returns to this theme in a thousand variations it would be lame to summarize. I prefer in any case to recommend the book than put it in a nutshell. And, apart from the poems already praised, here are a few favorites: "Lament for the Makers," "Icicles," "Pilgrimage," "Shirt," "The Night Game," "The Refinery," "At Pleasure Bay," and "Immortal Longings," with its beautiful conclusion:

       Under him, a thirsty brilliance.
       Pulsing or steady,
       The fixed lights of the city
 
       And the flood of carlights coursing
       Through the grid: Delivery,
       Arrival, Departure. Whim. Entering
 
       And entered. Touching
       And touched: down
       The lit boulevards, over the bridges
 
       And the river like an arm of night.
       Book, cigarette. Bathroom.
       Thirst. Some of us are asleep.
 
       We tilt roaring
       Over the glittering
       Zodiac of intentions.