SOURCE: "'Also This, Also That': Robert Pinsky's Poetics of Inclusion," in Agni, No. 36, 1992, pp. 272-80.

In the following review, Sacks lauds the "openness" of Pinsky's poetry.

With his two most recent collections of prose and poetry, Robert Pinsky enlarges his role as one of contemporary America's most valuable poet-critics. Seamlessly seductive, awakening pleasure as a form of responsiveness and responsibility, his freshness and brilliance serve a didactic yet liberating and inclusionary project—the restless, enlarging evolution of the art of poetry, of the identity of its makers, and of the audiences and worlds to which it is answerable. Pinsky does not urge poets to purify the dialect of the tribe. Rather his essays and poems subvert the assumption of purity itself. They embrace language at its most diverse (hieratic to slangy) and they meld an equal range of reference (Kol Nidre to Naughty Nurses), while seeking to move...