SOURCE: "World of Wonders," in The New York Times Book Review, August 18, 1996, p. 9.

Below, Pollitt admires the freshness of Pinsky's verse in The Figured Wheel.

Robert Pinsky's extraordinarily accomplished and beautiful volume of collected poems, The Figured Wheel, will remind readers that here is a poet who, without forming a mini-movement or setting himself loudly at odds with the dominant tendencies of American poetry, has brought into it something new—beginning with his first volume, Sadness and Happiness (1975), and gathering authority with each subsequent book. Call it a way of being autobiographical without being confessional, of connecting the particulars of the self—his Jewishness; his 1940's and 50's childhood in Long Branch, N.J.; his adult life as "professor or / Poet or parent or writing conference pooh-bah"—with the largest intellectual concerns of history, culture, psychology and art.

Poetry has become so disconnected from the other literary arts...