[In the following review, Sacks lauds the "openness" of Pinsky's poetry.]

With his two most recent collections of prose and poetry, Robert Pinsky enlarges his role as one of contemporary America's most valuable poet-critics. Seamlessly seductive, awakening pleasure as a form of responsiveness and responsibility, his freshness and brilliance serve a didactic yet liberating and inclusionary project—the restless, enlarging evolution of the art of poetry, of the identity of its makers, and of the audiences and worlds to which it is answerable. Pinsky does not urge poets to purify the dialect of the tribe. Rather his essays and poems subvert the assumption of purity itself. They embrace language at its most diverse (hieratic to slangy) and they meld an equal range of reference (Kol Nidre to Naughty Nurses), while seeking to move us beyond the rigid "tribal" or categorical borders that keep us apart, or at each other's throats, or just plain stuck—whether in the mud or in the rules that keep us out of it.

In his acclaimed book-length poem, An Explanation of America, Pinsky celebrated (not without sorrows and warnings) the nation's "everlasting possibility"—a phrase that marks the conserving yet transgressive impulse inherited from Whitman and Williams, and seasoned by Pinsky's own immersion, as the grandson of immigrant Jews, in the "not-quite melting pot" of modern American culture. As vehicles for opening up that realm of potential, Poetry and the World and The Want Bone share not only the same interests but also an elegant yet forceful mobility. In each, as for Whitman and Williams, mobility is at once an aesthetic device and the means for quickening erotic, political and spiritual urgencies. It is the inseparability and rhythmic stress of these "wants" that give Pinsky's poetry its underlying heart ("The legendary muscle that wants and grieves, / The organ of attachment"), and that make his work central to our time. Such a centrality is oddly clinched by his forays outward, as if magnetized by what lies beyond the rim of our cultural and poetic assumptions: "Society depends on the poet to witness something, and yet the poet can discover that thing only by looking away from what society has learned to see poetically."

With a gliding grace that honors both the wayward impulse itself and the previously excluded or unrepresented objects of attention (again the political crosses with the psychological), Pinsky's essays and poems embody the inclusory motion he admires in a wide range of authors from Campion to Bishop, from Babel to James McMichael and Anne Winters. Celebrating "fluidity of tone, including the inseparable blend of comic and ecstatic, formal and vulgar," he shows how, in McMichael's Four Good Things, "range … and formal fluidity, embody an art that defies any trite social correlatives of form," or how the movement itself of Winters's poetry conveys emotion, while its "packed formal alertness is part of a characteristically American response to shifting, undetermined manners, forms and idioms, te-heroic structures and appalling lives and deaths." Similar fidelities drive his praise of Frost, Stevens, Williams, Toomer, Oppen and others, for their loops of high and low diction, their "formal resourcefulness in defining one's place on shifting ground," their "inclusion of many actual and potential voices," and above all the "flexibility and speed" that mark their "responses to American social reality."

These are the attributes of Pinsky's own recent poems, including "poetry's freedom to dart from narrative to meditation to exposition and back, inserting a self-reflexive undermining of narrative illusion and then restoring narrative again, without visible seams or audible creaks." The poems shimmer with the allure and tensings of fabular romance, the genre of crossed thresholds, transgressive desires, and nonstop metamorphosis; and with a few deliberate exceptions, they soar with an astonishing fluency both of syntax and line as well as of quick-changing internal narratives, stances and tones. Pinsky sets one of the fastest paces of contemporary poetry: from the stride of Whitman along the open road, or the vigilant cruising of Williams behind the wheel of his car in Paterson (the essay "Some Passages of Isaiah" gives us Pinsky's "profane and glamorous" Grandpa Dave, whose pearl-gray Packard's steering wheel was ivory), Pinsky accelerates into flight "Over the glittering / zodiac of intentions," or rockets his poetic creatures on a "Voyage to the Moon." With this speed-up and metafictional play comes a new elusiveness of the lyric speaker; he has partly slipped from the driver's seat while in motion, following the weirdly decentering revolutions of desire and of the mind (Pinsky has also created a computer novel called Mindwheel), balancing both at the hub and rim of his inventions. If this sounds as threatening as it is liberating, it should be acknowledged that part of the poetry's spell derives not just from its near-magical flights of inclusion, but from its compounding of exhilaration and panic, of elegant freedom and jagged hunger. To quicken the heart's appetite is to submit it to incessant self-removes—especially as these removes are reinforced by the very means of poetry itself, "As when desiring we desire / Fresh musics of desire, at concentric removes."

One form of this self-displacement is Pinsky's use of what I assume to be an array of possible character-tropes who are themselves volatile and on the move. Thus one of the Ovidian traits of many of Pinsky's situations or characters is that they in turn displace themselves beyond custom or received identity. The book opens with at least three inaugural poems of this kind: "The Childhood of Jesus," with its Sabbath-defying hero who troubles the margins of sacred and profane, human and divine, Jew and Gentile, free creation and punitive withering, artifact and life; "Memoir," which moves from the repetitive self-bindings of Jewish commandment, "It was like saying: I am this, and not that," to the "immense blue / Pagan, an ocean, muttering, swollen: / That, and not this"; and "Window," which places a young child against the storm-fluent window of language (window itself shifts from Wind-hold to Windhole, constraint to aperture) by which he or she, identity in the very moment of breaking and remaking, gropes toward "the motion / Of motes and torches that at her word you reached / Out for, where you were, it was you, that bright confusion."

From these figures the book spirals outward through such multiple yet recursive and often coupled vessels as those of "The Hearts," or the "Plural, playful … double-budded god" of the embracing Shiva and Parvati, or the shifty Dantel/Belteshazzar, who criss-crosses between Jew and pagan, man and lion, subject and authority, comely and corrupt. Hence onward to the remarkable prose romance, "Jesus and Isolt," in which Jesus, who "won't be bound by my own nature," assumes the form of a ciclogriff, and attaches himself to Isolt and Tristan (much as Pinsky's poems attach themselves to pair after pair of legendary illicit lovers): "… in the heedless contradictions and paradoxes of the behavior of the two lovers in Isolt's own account, the Son of Man felt something that eased the restlessness of his own double nature. At times, it was as if he walked the streets of Jerusalem again, defying the Sanhedrin by curing the blind on the Sabbath." With the figure of Daniel, and the famished yet melodic jaw-bone of the book's title poem, this figure of the ciclogriff may be one of the most revealingly empowered yet burdened figures for Pinsky's daemon: "The Jewish soul of Jesus, pragmatic, ethical, logical, found in the passionate and self-defeating codes of romantic love and knightly combat some of what he lacked in the jeweled pavilions of Heaven." No less revealing: "Playfully, Tristram cuffed at the little creature with his free hand. The ciclogriff raised its dainty paw and caught Tristram's wrist, arresting the blow with the strength of an iron bar." Our final portrait of this freakish creature, unable to save the lovers from their chosen inferno of desire, shows him soaring heavenward to a reunion with his mother, whose consolations cannot soothe his insatiable compassion.

Following Pinsky's tropisms through the "maze of displacement and sublimation," a further sequence leads to Mrs. W. and the Chief of Police, the doomed yet resurrective couple of "At Pleasure Bay." This brilliant yet gently haunting poem ends the book under the medleyed, Whitmanian arias of tenor and catbird—"Never the same phrase twice … borrowed music that he melds and changes"—beside a river which blurs the borders of law and transgression, life and death, eros and the spirit, endings and beginnings.

Such a partial tracing slights the range within Pinsky's poems, for most of them tend to work individually the way the book works as a whole—by fugues of permuting themes and characters. "The Hearts" swings from Romeo and Juliet to Art Pepper, heroin addict, to Antony and Cleopatra, their runious yet glorious idolizings "placed" (in the sense of Pinsky's essay, "Poetry and the World") by the unworldly perspective of Buddha, yet offset by the fantastic visions of Isaiah. These hearts revolve as if upon the potter's wheel in Benares, or the wheel of God's imagings, or yet again the turning record of Lee Andrews and The Hearts. Acting as a democratizing leaven as well as a token of continuity—perhaps the phonemic germ-plasm of immortal desire—the exclamation "Oh!" transmigrates from Enobarbus's "but Oh! … Then you would have missed / A wonderful piece of work" (the last three words are Shakespeare's, spun via Pinsky's shifting contexts into contemporary street slang, something Art Pepper might have said) to the closing ah's of the poem:

As the record ends, a coda in retard:
The Hearts in a shifting velvety ah, and ah
Prolonged again, and again as Lee Andrews

Reaches ah high for I have to gain Faith, Hope
And Charity, God only knows the girl
Who will love me—Oh! if we only could

Start over again! Then The Hearts chant the chords
Again a final time, ah and the record turns
Through all the music, and on into silence again.

In these supple tercets, a favored form for Pinsky, with their odd-numbered openness, shifting caesuras, and stanza-enjambing syntax, the poem reaches not only its merger of erotic and religious longings, but also the expression of one of the underlying wants of the book: "Oh! if we only could // Start over again." It is a desire prolonged or renewed throughout the book, extending to the final poem's vision of a posthumous embrace from whose climax the soul

To "begin again" on the crossed currents of a restless, and here eroticized, metaphysical hunger—such a want impels much of the lyric poetry of a secular, origin-starved yet origin-fleeing modern America. The need intensifies for Pinsky, as a man of heterodox piety, half-swayed by Judaism's redundant chants of faith and by its taboos against idolatry, even as he rebels against its bonds and discriminations. Like a jazz soloist escaping from a phrasal cage or cradle, he breaks free to value the heathen murmurings of the ocean, the clangor of idol-smith and marketplace, the "shifting velvety ah, and ah" of The Hearts. He shakes off whatever might keep him from registering the full range of a fetishistic culture and its idols beneath whose crude or polished surfaces his own genius seeks out the roots of authentic longing. Here Poetry and the World is again crucial reading, for it taps the autobiographical current of Pinsky's various departures not only from religious orthodoxy, but from what he calls "the coercion of circumstance." Jewish law, fixed identity, "birth and ancestry," "social fact," historical determinism, authoritarian education, time itself, and finally a view of death as fixed terminus—these are some of the limits against which the poet's appetite awakens. I should add that this appetite depends on such limits, both as they define and sharpen a desire for the unlimited, and as they reinforce the very differences which poetry as a medium of representation requires. It is this dependency that partly accounts for the more than occasional undertone of anxiety and sorrow in these poems. It underlies the book's thematic interest in illicit lovers, whose doom figures not only the attempt to undo totemic differences on which selves and societies depend, but also the ravenous desire of a poetry that wants to become the world, to get beyond the and of "Poetry and the World." And finally it is this rebellious dependency that, because of the reach and stamina of Pinsky's imagination, leads him to "immortal longings" and their eschatological hopes.

How to begin again? How to get truly free? How to include novelty without falling into an abyss of incoherence, unrepresentability, guilt? In Pinsky's work, at least two strategies come to mind beyond mobility itself or the inclusive displacements of "Also this, / Also that." One is to acknowledge, as in the latter line-breaking yet line-linking phrase, that breaking and bonding may mark all creative activity. The child Jesus breaks the Sabbath by creating a dam and molding clay birds which he then sends breaking into endless flight. Not only does their flight exceed the limits of his knowledge, but his display of power seems indiscriminable from the angry magic by which he cripples another child who broke the dam (and who also thereby set free the water's flow). The Benares potter molds new vessels from old smithereens and dust; the child in "Icicles" breaks the totemic beard of "crystal chimes" down to their originary stems (just as the careful off-rhymes break to new tones); couples burn through selfhood to the one life-force within yet beyond themselves; poetry breaks to absorb the unpoetic; a society ruptures to include new immigrants who in turn enlarge their own self-definitions; one story line is cut and spliced to others. A still more fluent version of such remakings is the "meld and change" of creaturely, linguistic and thematic transmigration, the undogmatic mythos behind such poems as "The Hearts," "The Refinery," "Pilgrimage" and "At Pleasure Bay."

Such inventions bring into focus a second, overlapping strategy—Pinsky's celebration of a shared activity that transcends aesthetic, social, temporal or religious divisions:

The crowd at the ballpark sing, the cantor sings
Kol Nidre, and the equipment in our cars
Fills them with singing voices while we drive.

When the warlord hears his enemy is dead,
He sings his praises. The old men sang a song
And we protesters sang a song against them …

As the poem unfolds, the multiple, various, and yet single song evolves to include the returning gods who sing us and themselves back into anonymity beyond the eschaton, "the whole cold salty world / Humming oblation to what our mouths once made." This is one of the far reaches of Pinsky's dreams of origins and ends, as in "Pilgrimage" or "The Refinery," where the gods "batten on the vats" of our utterances "As though we were their aphids, or their bees, / That monstered up sweetness for them while they dozed." A visionary circuit of song between human and divine, this pantheistic atonement would bind us all into a continuum of death and renewal, a continuum dependent on our own makings. Making, after all, is the only activity that can appease our wants. But because these wants exceed any object, they call for continuous remakings, not merely within our lives but between those of generations. Hence the "lament" and the immortality of sexual making, and of work—as additional poems like "The Ghost Hammer" or "Shirt" confirm: "George Herbert, your descendant is a Black / Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma / And she inspected my shirt." This great chain of making is forged in the monstrous, desperate, yet glorious labor

To stir the mysteries, Love and Work, we have made
And that make us willing to die for them—
That make us bleed, embodied maybe in codes,

Spurts of pressure and crucial variations
In the current of the soul, that lives by changing.

To close, we may wonder how a poet so devoted to openness will now reach beyond the spurts and variations of these unique poems. One possible shift (apart from moves toward yet other genres) may in fact lead toward less openness, less assimilation. Such a shift might embody a less defiant but still more searching view of the limits and differentiations on which Pinsky so resistantly depends. So too, getting outside or beside the "omnivorous verve" that drives these poems might be a way of achieving a different kind of success from the one reached by the most heterogeneous of the current works. If poetry must assimilate what Pinsky earlier called "the whole unswallowable / Menu of immensities," how to survive the threats of choking (as depicted in an earlier poem "The Saving") or of surrendering to a gaping, endless consumption—the shark's jaw picked clean by yet other hungry mouths? I cite these images to suggest that Pinsky is already aware that the predicament, as presently formulated, gives no rest. If Also this must make way for Also that (an inclusion that yields a new this, ringed by a new that), how to arrest the fugue of "concentric removes," or establish the limits of the poem, or achieve a degree of self-presence that may allow a deeper, still more indelible etching of what one is, rather than of what one may become?

Here again, Pinsky is ahead of such questions: there is a powerful imprint and signature in the astonishing originality of his poems as well as in such already mentioned figures à clef as Daniel, the ciclogriff and the stranded want bone. And those of his essays which focus on the unworldly—in the form of a religious faith, a resistant idiosyncrasy, or a "sense of limit"—reveal his interest in a vantage from which the poet may reveal his or her own inwardness while also discriminating the claims and place of the worldly. If Pinsky recalls Grandpa Dave's apparent "contempt for piety and rabbi-craft," he also notes that "if he was a bad Jew [he] was at least a bad Orthodox Jew," one who took his son (Pinsky's father) to eleven months of daily prayer for the dead—prompting that son ("young, pragmatic, preoccupied with worldly concerns") to do the same years later for his father. It is this self-limiting circle of humility and mourning (one which is here made possible by inherited ritual), which for Pinsky saves these acts of worship from idolatry, just as the recognition of scarcity brings value into the world. As a child, the poet of "The Night Game" devised a private baseball hero more gifted than the actual Whitey Ford: "a Dodger. / People were amazed by him. / Once, when he was young, / He refused to pitch on Yom Kippur."

In whatever direction Pinsky evolves—toward a more pressing sense of limits, or toward further acts of inclusion, or toward yet other ways of suspending such oppositions ("Doing a brake job, he sings into the wheel")—American poetry and culture will move with him. There are few poets or critics better able to challenge and lead us from this century to the next, and perhaps none who will do so with the dazzling combination of energy, invention and generous delight, both in poetry and the world, to be found in these two books.