The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall: Poems at the Extremes of Feeling

by Robert Pinsky

Overview

Robert Pinsky, “our finest living example of [the American civic poet]” (New York Times), gathers poems that cope with the most extreme human emotions.

Despair, mania, rage, guilt, derangement, fantasy: poetry is our most intimate source for the urgent, varied experience of human emotion. Poems get under our skin; they offer solace with the balm, and the sting, of understanding. In The Book of Poetry for Hard Times, former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky curates poems that explore the expanses of human emotion across centuries, from Shakespeare to Terrance Hayes, Dante to Patricia Lockwood. Each poem reveals something new about our most profound and universal experiences; taken together they offer a sweeping ode to the power of poetry.

“For anyone who knows these human feelings—and almost everyone does—this book will become an essential companion.”—Eavan Boland

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324001799
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	10/22/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	603,357
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Robert Pinsky is the award-winning author of over twenty volumes of poetry. He served as United States poet laureate from 1997 to 2000, during which time he founded the Favorite Poem Project. He teaches at Boston University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Editorial Reviews

"This magnificent collection of deeply felt poems includes many of our favorites but just as many unfamiliar and delightful surprises, each one introduced with quick analytical insight and panache by the former Poet Laureate, who knows his field as well as anyone alive. The result is a lively, stimulating reading experience from end to end."

Phillip Lopate

"This compelling, eloquent anthology achieves what might otherwise seem impossible: persuading the unsayable into melody and cadence and meaning. States of grief, doubt, turmoil, regret, whose roots are usually in shadow and silence, become memorable poems here. For anyone who knows these human feelings—and almost everyone does—this book will become an essential companion."

Eavan Boland

"Lovely, so deep, verses so well positioned to each other…We ‘fall’ into the careful labyrinths mapped and guided by Pinsky, with things to hold on to—delicate preludes, bold structures, preliminary introductions. The ‘cliffs’ are various, that is, the poems, their ‘feeling’ forces, their inner apogees of power…A treasure, this book, an alarming call to the present—a fiery devouring black hole of mind-stars blows out to topple you and burn you down—so you can live again."

Juan Felipe Herrera

"The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall is a thrilling roller-coaster ride of an anthology. Just when you think you have mastered the pitch and roll of one emotional extreme, you find yourself careening around a bend into a different extreme. And Pinsky’s individual selections are at once deft and surprising: a Renaissance Old Master like Fulke Greville sits cheek-by-jowl with poets like Keetje Kuipers and Katie Willingham, born within hailing distance of the present. The collection is a perfect introduction to poetry’s enduring power to explore the utmost bounds of our experience."

Stephen Greenblatt