{"id":492,"date":"2017-05-26T14:26:35","date_gmt":"2017-05-26T14:26:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/floridareview.cah.ucf.edu\/?post_type=article&p=492"},"modified":"2017-05-26T14:26:35","modified_gmt":"2017-05-26T14:26:35","slug":"restless-curiosity","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/article\/restless-curiosity\/","title":{"rendered":"Restless Curiosity"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the Foundling Hospital<\/em> by Robert Pinsky<\/strong>
\n Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016<\/strong>
\n 59 pages, hardbound, $23.00<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The threads running through Robert Pinsky\u2019s At the Foundling Hospital<\/em> are varied enough to provide the topics for a Jeopardy<\/em> round: music, language and languages, names and naming, identity and origins. And Pinsky\u2019s restless curiosity is mirrored by the various forms these poems assume. There are sonnets, couplet and tercet poems, lists, narrative poems, brief lyrics, and free-associative repetitions. What melds these disparate elements, rendering the book a seamless read, is Pinsky\u2019s cerebral yet human voice.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Taking its cue from the collection\u2019s epigraph from Pindar (\u201cWhat is someone?\u201d), that voice offers more questions than postulations. Sometimes those questions are explicit, as in \u201cGenesis\u201d: \u201cWhere was the kiln, what was the clay? \/ What drove the wheel that turned the vessel?\u201d At other times the questions are implicit, often involving notions of accepted faith. In \u201cSayings of the Old\u201d the speaker remembers an acquaintance who \u201chates the sanctimonious Buddha-goo \/ But loves to meditate.\u201d And in \u201cDream Medicine\u201d the speaker recalls a childhood encounter with his father when,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u2026from the Ford\u2019s back seat,
\nI asked him, did he believe in Life after Death?
\nHis eyes in the rear-view mirror kind of shrugged,
\n\u201cI don\u2019t know, probably not,\u201d he said. \u201cOr maybe
\nLook at it this way: you are my life after death.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m tired of the gods, I\u2019m pious about the ancestors,\u201d \u201cCreole\u201d begins, an attitude that is evident throughout this book. While Pinsky often pokes and prods at ideas surrounding religious belief, he seems much more interested in people. \u201cThe Foundling Tokens\u201d is a beautiful meditation on how the orphaned children were identified by something tangible when they were brought in: \u201cBit of lace or a pewter brooch, \/ Identifying coin, button \/ Or bangle. One crushed thimble, \/ noted at admission.\u201d The poem expands to include Africans on the slave passage, \u201cthe Chinese immigrants \/ In the dark Angel Island \/ Internment cells,\u201d and the people who left \u201ca rhyme or name\u201d scraped \u201cInto the very death-compound dirt\u201d of a concentration camp. What did it avail any of them? \u201c\u2026almost never was \/ A foundling reclaimed, ever.\u201d These poems never flinch from such hard truths, yet they wear those truths lightly, neither celebrating the darkness nor inviting pity in its wake.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Pinsky is widely acknowledged as a contemporary master. Everywhere in this collection I am made aware of a confidence of sensibility and craft, the sense that he can accomplish anything the poems set out to do. Partly that is surely the result of long practice. But there is also generosity of spirit here. The few explicitly narrative poems we do have are concerned as much with other people as they are with the speaker. Pinsky\u2019s impulse is to honor the people who often don\u2019t have a voice, such as the veteran in \u201cRadioman\u201d who matter-of-factly joined another platoon, his having been wiped out in the Battle of the Bulge: \u201cWe slept, we ate. \/ I had another outfit, somewhere to be. \/ They had a radioman, and that was me.\u201d The abandoned in the Foundling Hospital, his grandmother who delivered wisdom in Yiddish, and childhood friends who have died receive the same fond attention as do Irving Berlin and Ray Charles and God.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There is no axe to grind here, no quarrel with fate (but neither is there complacency). Rather, there is the acknowledgement that the speaker of these poems is corporeal, one among countless. \u201cProcession\u201d begins with a description of the array of telescopes atop Mauna Kea and their ability to travel back through time. Inevitably, that focus leads the speaker to a meditation about our shared human past. \u201cInnumerable names and doings, innumerable \/ Destinies, remote histories, deities and tongues. \/ Somewhere among them your ancestor the slave, \/ Also your ancestors the thief the prince the stranger,\u201d all of them \u201c\u2026traveling a filament of light \/ Across the nothing between the clouds of being \/ Into the pinhole iris of your mortal eye.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The poems in At the Foundling Hospital<\/em> examine what it is to be human through the microcosm of individual experience. Robert Pinsky\u2014sometimes reverent, sometimes irreverent, but always honest and forthright\u2014is our guide. This book is strong evidence that he deserves the respect he is so often accorded.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Please also see our interview with Robert Pinsky<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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