Award-winning poet Robert Pinsky鈥檚 first two collections鈥�Sadness And Happiness and An Explanation of America鈥攁nnounced the arrival of a major new voice in American poetry. Now, these acclaimed books are presented together in a single volume featuring a new preface by the author, introducing a new generation of readers to the groundbreaking early work of a beloved poet. Sadness And Happiness explores everyday subjects such as the streets and oceanfront of Pinsky鈥檚 hometown of Long Branch, New Jersey, while the long title poem of An Explanation of America examines personal and national myths as it transports readers across the country.
Robert Pinsky is an award-winning American poet, essayist, and translator. He has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. He served for three terms as the U.S. Poet Laureate, during which time he founded the Favorite Poem Project. His many books include On Poetry, Culture, and Democracy (快色直播), the memoir Jersey Breaks: Becoming an American Poet, and the poetry collections Proverbs of Limbo, At the Foundling Hospital, and Selected Poems. His bestselling translation of Dante’s Inferno won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Among his other awards and honors are the William Carlos Williams Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the PEN/Voelcker Award, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the PEN American Center. He is distinguished professor emeritus of English and creative writing at Boston University.
Praise for Sadness And Happiness“It is refreshing to find a poet who is intellectually interesting and technically first-rate. Robert Pinsky belongs to that rarest category of talents, a poet-critic.”—Robert Lowell“Remarkable. . . . What [these poems] are attempting is important: nothing less than the recovery for language of a whole domain of mute and familiar experience.”—Hugh Kenner, Los Angeles Times Book Review“The pleasures of Pinsky. . . . are the unfashionable, or at least the unfamiliar, ones of sanity, the cool entertainment of alternatives, and the conviction . . . that speech . . . is not only interesting but shares with both lyric and nonsense a certainty of resonance.”—Richard Howard, Poetry“The best work by a younger poet within recent memory.”—William Pritchard, Times Literary Supplement“Pinsky is the most exhilarating new poet I have read since A. R. Ammons. . . . In his peculiar and original combination of abstract utterance and vivid image Pinsky points the way toward the future of poetry.”—Louis Martz, Yale Review“The distinction of the title-poem is that it lives up to the Wordsworthian promise of its title—surveying the human condition with calculated artlessness, using the broadly human terms ‘sadness’ and ‘happiness,’ for all their impreciseness, rather than others which, though more precise, would not be part of the language that men do commonly use. It takes courage in our day to carry democratic principles in poetic language so far.”—Donald Davie
Praise for An Explanation of America“[An] ambitious and immensely likable long poem . . . a poem which—a rare thing—seems to combine intimacy and authority.”—David Kalstone, New York Times Book Review“Wise and compassionate. . . . It is one of the most readable long poems in recent memory, graspable by all.”—Kenneth Funsten, Los Angeles Times“I can’t imagine anyone who, after reading An Explanation of America, wouldn’t want to return to it again and again.”—William H. Pritchard, Poetry
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