[Mitchell is an American poet, critic, and educator. In the following review, he praises Pinsky's poetic ambitions and the combination of "boldness" and "restraint" in the poems in History of My Heart.]

Three short poems in History of My Heart, called "Three on Luck," are written so convincingly in the rhythms and phrases of contemporary speech that, next to the others in the book, they sound like poems in dialect. Beside them the rest seem formal and ornate. They are also the only poems in the book spoken by someone other than Pinsky, or the person we take to be Pinsky. The older poet in "Three on Luck" says, "'Don't squander the success of your first book; / Now that you have a little reputation, / Be patient until you've written one as good.'" By contrast, "The Unseen" ends with a passage of old-fashioned rhetoric which does what I imagine rhetoric has always done, i.e., compress thought and feeling in an expansion of syntax and locution:

                                     … we have
       No shape, we are poured out like water, but still
 
       We try to take in what won't be turned from in despair:
       As if, just as we turned toward the fumbled drama
       Of the religious art shop window to accuse you [God]
       Yet again, you were to slit open your red heart
       To show us at last the secret of your day and also,
       Because it also is yours, of your night.

I swore I would not use Pinsky's excellent book of criticism, The Situation of Poetry, in reviewing his poetry, but the first thing I want to say about it is said there too well: "There is a temptation to see much of modern poetry's history as a series of strategies for retaining or recovering the elevation of Victorian diction." Pinsky's strategy for doing this seems to be his own. He mixes rhetoric with a quiet, uninflected, undramatic language, one that I associate with Ashbery, as though ordinary language and experience had to be present in the poem in all their ordinariness to make the poem legitimate. Pinsky is not photographing mental experience, as Ashbery often seems to be, but rendering carefully conceived poems, indeed statements on life, in a surreptitious manner.

This is not to say that he lacks ambition for his poems. The person who titles his books An Explanation of America, Sadness and Happiness, and History of My Heart is aiming high. The poems often have a similar grandiosity, a need to summarize and signify experience, which makes the interest in Victorian diction understandable. The deflated, almost boring, contemporary speech with which it is mixed anchors the poem and keeps it from drifting too far out to sea. In "The Street," for example, we have patches of prose like this:

       Once a stranger drove off in a car
       With somebody's wife,
 
       And he ran after them in his undershirt
       And threw his shoe at the car.

"The Street" begins, however, with a self-conscious, elaborated image written in an elevated diction:

       Streaked and fretted with effort, the thick
       Vine of the world, red nervelets
       Coiled at its tips.
 
       All roads lead from it.

The verbless first sentence is almost stagey, but it indicates Pinsky's grand design. As the poem says at the end, in another flourish of rhetoric:

       Nothing was too ugly or petty or terrible
       To be weighed in the immense
 
       Silver scales of the dead: the looming
       Balances set right onto the live, dangerous
       Gray bark of the street.

Pinsky's aim in this book, as I've indicated, is not slight. He wishes to find and, if not find, to give point to the pointless sprawl of existence. The book opens with "The Figured Wheel," a poem that rolls all of creation up, as it were, into one ball, where everything is "figured and prefigured in the nothing-transfiguring wheel." "The Living" tries the impossible, namely, to find "glory" in the randomness of existence: "… the most miserable // Find in the mere daylight and air / A miraculous daily bread." If that seems too wilful or banal, the poem ends with a more measured, but no less comprehensive, statement in its final image: "this impenetrable haze, this prolonged / But not infinite surfeit of glory."

I like the boldness of the best of these poems, as well as the attempt to praise. The restraint in the praise seems justified, too, considering the atrocities we commit daily. Today, poets are apt to look for what matters in what comes their way. Poems of overt will and design are viewed sceptically. Pinsky may have found a way to hold these incompatible things together, just as he holds "the boredom and the glory" together.