Robert Pinsky

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History of My Heart

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SOURCE: A review of History of My Heart, in The Georgia Review, Vol. XXXIX, No. 1, Spring, 1985, pp. 213-14.

[Corey is an American poet, critic, and educator. In the following review, a portion of which appeared in CLC-38, he praises Pinsky for the depth of his insights and for not succumbing to sentimentality as he offers hopeful "assertions" about the human condition.]

The rhythms of Robert Pinsky's work are characterized by a graceful sheen and ease that some readers have taken as an indication of a moral naïveté or indifference or even flippancy; he has been thought too decorous, too much the aesthete, for our difficult age. But his caring and wisdom run deep, and the quiet tones of his poems only lay a delicate skin over the abyss he has seen too well. Apparently, he finds the lullings and liftings of music to be among the only stays sufficiently strong for our bleak confusions: "The world, random, / Is so real, it is as if our own / Good or bad luck were here only / As a kind of filler, holding together / Just that much of the adjacent / Splendor and terror."

One way to bend the luck, to try to steer the random for a moment, is by making memory work hard enough—driving it down to the specific places and names in our histories. Sometimes the drive leads to terror, as in "The Unseen" [from History of My Heart], a poem about visiting the "monument" of a concentration camp. While there, Pinsky recalls that he has daydreamed about achieving a Lear-like vengeance upon the Nazis by roaming the camps invisibly: "At first I savor my mastery / Slowly by creating small phantom diversions, / Then kill kill kill kill, a detailed and strangely / Passionless inward movie."

Other times, terror softens to profound sadness, as in "The Questions": with a sympathy reminiscent of Philip Levine's in The Names of the Lost, Pinsky returns to the stream of adults who moved through his childhood in his father's office: "I want for them not to have died in awful pain, friendless. / Though many of the living are starving, I still pray for these, / Dead, mostly anonymous (but Mr. Monk, Mrs. Rose Vogel) / And barely remembered: that they had a little extra, something / For pleasure, a good meal, a book…."

And for Pinsky, there are even times when splendor wins out—really wins, except for that tinge of sadness whose emergence from all things is the only certainty we have. In the long title poem, Pinsky offers a believable hope and innocence almost extinct in serious American poetry of this century. Across some two hundred lines, he confronts and defeats constant threats of sentimentality as he explores the minutiae of autobiography, searching for what can only be called a theory of desire. Early in "History of My Heart," Pinsky says that "happiness needs a setting," and nearly all of the poem is devoted to providing this—from his mother's early stories of life before his birth, on up through his own memories of infancy, childhood, and adolescence.

The poem culminates with a dozen lines of assertion, just the kind of proselytizing that poets often try to shun. But on the strength and beauty of what he has already said, and of these closing lines themselves, Pinsky carries his poem beyond fashion and proscription. With a dazzling mixture of images and dictions, he recalls his teenage days as a saxophonist, thinking how sometimes "I felt / My heart following after a capacious form, / Sexual and abstract, in the thunk, thrum, / Thrum, come-wallow and then a little screen / Of quicker notes goosing to a fifth higher, winging / To clang-whomp of a major seventh: listen to me / Listen to me, the heart says in reprise until sometimes / In the course of giving itself it flows out of itself / All the way across the air, in a music piercing / As the kids at the beach calling from the water Look, / Look at me, to their mothers, but out of itself, into / The listener the way feeling pretty or full of erotic revery / Makes the one who feels seem beautiful to the beholder / Witnessing the idea of the giving of desire—nothing more wanted / Than the little singing notes of wanting—the heart / Yearning further into giving itself into the air, breath / Strained into song emptying the golden bell it comes from, / The pure source poured altogether out and away."

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History of My Heart