The figured wheel

Robert Pinsky's The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996 gathers together all his poetry to date, including twenty-one new poems. The critic Hugh Kenner, writing about Pinsky's first volume, described this poet's project as "nothing less than the recovery for language of a whole domain of mute and familiar experience." Transformation of the familiar and uttering of what had been mute or implicit within culture continue to be central to Pinsky's art. New poems like "Avenue" and "The City Elegies" envision the city's mysterious epitome of human pain and imagination, forces that…