Gulf Music

Joel Brouwer reviews Robert Pinsky's latest collection in tomorrow's Sunday Book Review:

[I]n “Gulf Music” Pinsky offers us his most valuable contribution yet: not just an argument for but a demonstration of contemporary poetry’s necessity and vitality in our democracy.

“Deciding to remember, and what to remember,” Pinsky has written, “is how we decide who we are.” Poetry’s role in that process is simultaneously to preserve our common American memory and honor our diversity, to make music in the gulf between unum and pluribus. This is an intractable instance of the one-many problem if ever there was one, but Pinsky seeks from the first to address it in his new collection’s opening “Poem of Disconnected Parts.”

At Robben Island the political prisoners studied.
They coined the motto Each one Teach one.

In Argentina the torturers demanded the prisoners
Address them always as “Profesor.”

Many of my friends are moved by guilt, but I
Am a creature of shame, I am ashamed to say.

Culture the lock, culture the key. Imagination
That calls the boiled sheep heads in the market “Smileys.”

With its clear language and sturdy blank verse, the poem offers images of state violence past and present, intimate moments of self-analysis, allusions to Homer’s “Odyssey,” ambiguous references to the poet’s own family history that no reader unfamiliar with his earlier books would understand, philosophical conjectures, even the thoughts of a traditional Zulu healer: “The Sangomo says in our Zulu culture we do not / Worship our ancestors: we consult them.”