At the Foundling Hospital: Poems

By Robert Pinsky

“Since the death of Robert Lowell in 1977, no single figure has dominated American poetry the way that Lowell, or before him Eliot, once did . . . But among the many writers who have come of age in our fin de siècle, none have succeeded more completely as poet, critic, and translator than Robert Pinsky.” —James Longenbach, The Nation

With all the generosity and mastery we have come to expect from out three-time Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky has written a bold, lyrical meditation on identity and culture as hybrid and fluid, violent as well as creative: the enigmatic, maybe universal, condition of the foundling. At the Foundling Hospital considers the foundling soul: its need to be adopted, and its need to be adaptive. These poems reimagine identity on the scale of one life or of human history: from “the emanation of a dead star still alive” to the “pinhole iris of your mortal eye.”

What is a particular person? How unique? What is anyone born as? Born with? Born into? The poems of Robert Pinsky’s At the Foundling Hospital engage personality and culture as improvised from loss: a creative effort so pervasive it can be invisible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Oct 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9780374715472

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky was the nation’s Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2000. An acclaimed poet and scholar of poetry, he is also an internationally renowned man of letters. His Selected Poems was published in paperback in March 2012. His other books include The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide and his bestselling translation The Inferno of Dante, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award. He teaches at Boston University and is the poetry editor at Slate.

Book preview

INSTRUMENT

It was a little newborn god

That made the first instrument:

Sweet vibration of

Mind, mind, mind

Enclosed in its orbit.

He scooped out a turtle’s shell

And strung it with a rabbit’s guts.

O what a stroke, to invent

Music from an empty case

Strung with bloody filaments—

The wiry rabbitflesh

Plucked or strummed,

Pulled taut across the gutted

Resonant hull of the turtle:

Music from a hollow shell

And the insides of a rabbit.

Sweet conception, sweet

Instrument of mind,

Mind, mind: Mind

Itself a capable vibration

Thrumming from here to there

In the cloven brainflesh

Contained in its helmet of bone—

Like an electronic boxful

Of channels and filaments

Bundled inside a case,

A little musical robot

Dreamed up by the mind

Embedded in the brain

With its blood-warm channels

And its humming network

Of neurons, engendering

The newborn baby god—

As clever and violent

As his own instrument

Of sweet, all-consuming

Imagination,