At the Foundling Hospital: Poems

At the Foundling Hospital: Poems

<p><b>“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 <i>fin de siècle</i>, none have succeeded more completely as poet, critic, and translator than Robert Pinsky.” —James Longenbach<i>, The Nation</i></b></p><p>With all the generosity and mastery we have come to expect from out three-time Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky has written a bold, lyrical mediation on identity and culture as hybrid and fluid, violent as well as creative: the enigmatic, maybe universal, condition of the foundling. <i>At the Foundling Hospital</i> 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.”</p><p> What is a particular person? How unique? What is anyone born as? Born with? Born into? The poems of Robert Pinsky’s <i>At the Foundling Hospital</i> engage personality and culture as improvised from loss: a creative effort so pervasive it can be invisible.</p>