[In An Explanation of America Pinsky] organizes rigorously: a brief prefatory lyric and a concluding dedicatory elegy frame the title poem, fifty-five pages long, which divides into three parts ("Its Many Fragments," "Its Great Emptiness," "Its Everlasting Possibility"), each of which has four titled sections. The twelve sections give him an "epic" arrangement and might make us think of Milton, although Pinsky, unfashionably and polemically, sees America not as a paradise lost but as the old New World.

He means his title's audacity to give way to exactness…. Moreover, explanations can be "True or false." He never quite points out that "explanation" means "to open out, to spread out flat," but he might have. To put it one way, Pinsky levels with us. His vocabulary is large and varied but never arcane. His figures illustrate or carry forth arguments rather than lay claim to a unique sensibility. His...