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Rating: 
Summary: solid, solid work
Review: I guess his work is so controversial because it's so thoroughly formalist in a time of experimentation. He is a very feeling person, a poet of feeling & great genius. He addresses all sorts of themes in these poems. All sorts, from the serenely bucolic [he sometimes begins poems by showing the reader that he's been sure to learn things about what he uses for images) to overtly sexual experiments that he says in the poem make you feel dirty. In one he muses about philosophy in general, which he declares as a poet is not his field, not quite, as nothing can stop the poet from thinking (no matter how much exile that means, I must add)but the thinking of poetry is be for poetry.He is a very important poet. He was honored with the distinction of U.S. poet laureate three times in a row -- the first ever to be three times in a row -- because he's done more work for the vitality of poetry than almost any other person alive, matched or nearly matched by very few. In his scholarship, he studies everything so intently. In his writing, he channels the world through an equally unsparing dedication to mastery.
Rating: 
Summary: a few good poems, but generally pseudo-formal
Review: The opening poems in this collection, the more recent ones, gave me reason to think I wouldn't continue with the book, for they consisted of pseudo-formal poetry at its most representative. Line breaks and stanzaic patterns had completely lost touch with meaning and content. After these poems, the collection improves, at least marginally. Every now and then a rhymed or off-rhymed piece appears, and many poems use either a loose pentameter or a free verse line of which, as Theodore Roethke would say, one can see the ghost of formal verse lurking behind it. Pinsky uses assonance and consonance to enrich his lines; concrete imagery and language are plentiful, which will please readers who look for this feature first and foremost; but few lines herein are really memorable. Still, I would single out poems like "Shirt," "Icicles," and "From the Childhood of Jesus" as noteworthy ones.
Rating:
Summary: Contrived
Review: The reader from north of Boston is so, so right! Along the same lines, I will just say that Pinsky's poems, especially the most recent ones, seem "worked up," unconnected to any real emotional sources; the contrived poems can still be impressive, but they ARE contrivances, and that fact keeps Pinsky from being the major poet that so many critics seem to think he is.
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