A few good, solid poems here. Is it just me, however, or does anyone else out there feel the emperor is wearing increasingly fewer clothes? The technical control is masterful, yes, but I miss the greater vision of AN EXPLANATION OF AMERICA and Pinsky's other earlier works.

In what turns out to be quite an interesting collection of Poems, Robert Pinsky uses his stripped down style to convey his messages clearly, but with a sense of symbolism. In each writing, the point is introduced pretty early in the reading, and then expounded upon in ways that few poets I have encountered are able to. In addition, the length of each one is nearly perfect, keeping the reader's attention while still expressing exactly what Pinsky wants to say. I certainly recommend this book to anyone who has read poetry before and is interested in a slight change of pace.

First got cued to this book by Shawn Penn who took an extensive amount of time on Charlie Rose to explain the significance of "Sweet Time Unafflicted" from Pinsky's ABC in his own life. It is a simple, accesible beauty that Pinksy strives for and delivers, many of his poems focusing on contemporary themes and keeping their lexicon to the modern. As in ABC Pinsky builds several stanzas throughout the book on 26 word strings in alphabetical order. If as a reader you are interested in expanding your present interests into contemporary poetry the work of this Poet Laureate may be a sublimely fufilling place to begin.

Pinsky sifts through images and myths from both outside and inside America, alternating between the conventional and the idiosyncratic, reaching into the past towards the future, testing the limits of each framework. He always seems centered in the experiential but, almost always, works at arm's length. He really wants to encompass it all, and the scale of his ambition adds dignity to his results. I love this poem, no less for its ambitiousness than its scrupulous balance.

Robert Pinsky taught my undergraduate course in Seventeenth Century English poetry. Even now, his writing speaks to me in the same even, deliberate tone that, in the classroom, could be depended upon to launch into an explanation-reasoned, swift, feeling, comprehensive.

The last time we talked about poetry was shortly after An Explanation of America was published, when coincidentally he was on sabbatical at UC-Berkeley and I was in graduate school there. One afternoon our paths crossed, as I was rushing east across the Berkeley campus to my son's daycare. He said some readers found the poem too gloomy. I disagreed -but was too much in a hurry to set the record straight!

The end of 1999 finds me with more time to write and think, but also less optimistic about America. As much as I admire the brilliance with which the last line of the poem leaves America standing there as an undefended open question-"so large, and strangely broken, and unforeseen," it is in chapter two, Its Great Emptiness, where I find the vulnerability of American identity most deeply challenged. Pinsky, citing Horace, revives a vision of human freedom that I can no longer identify as belonging particularly to America-any more than I might have considered it as Roman.

"When a man stoops to pluck at the coin some boys of Rome have soldered to the street, I think that just then he is no more free than any prisoner, or slave; it seems that someone who wants too much to get things is also someone who fears, and living in that fear cannot be free."

Ann Rutledge/Wellesley 1976 rutlog@hotmail.com

The opening poems in this collection, the more recent ones, gave me reason to think I wouldn't continue with the book, for they consisted of pseudo-formal poetry at its most representative. Line breaks and stanzaic patterns had completely lost touch with meaning and content. After these poems, the collection improves, at least marginally. Every now and then a rhymed or off-rhymed piece appears, and many poems use either a loose pentameter or a free verse line of which, as Theodore Roethke would say, one can see the ghost of formal verse lurking behind it. Pinsky uses assonance and consonance to enrich his lines; concrete imagery and language are plentiful, which will please readers who look for this feature first and foremost; but few lines herein are really memorable. Still, I would single out poems like "Shirt," "Icicles," and "From the Childhood of Jesus" as noteworthy ones.

Pensky's forms do not overwhelm the sound and sense of his poems. He is onto something new and good. The freshness he brings to American poetry is rare.

I guess his work is so controversial because it's so thoroughly formalist in a time of experimentation. He is a very feeling person, a poet of feeling & great genius. He addresses all sorts of themes in these poems. All sorts, from the serenely bucolic [he sometimes begins poems by showing the reader that he's been sure to learn things about what he uses for images) to overtly sexual experiments that he says in the poem make you feel dirty. In one he muses about philosophy in general, which he declares as a poet is not his field, not quite, as nothing can stop the poet from thinking (no matter how much exile that means, I must add)but the thinking of poetry is be for poetry.

He is a very important poet. He was honored with the distinction of U.S. poet laureate three times in a row -- the first ever to be three times in a row -- because he's done more work for the vitality of poetry than almost any other person alive, matched or nearly matched by very few. In his scholarship, he studies everything so intently. In his writing, he channels the world through an equally unsparing dedication to mastery.

This is the most misleading title ever. The book promises to help you resore your intimacy. For someone suffering from depression and looking for a way to fix their diminished sexual desire, this book is a cruel joke with nothing more to say than "Talk to your doctor about it".

You can save yourself a lot of time and money if you already know the basics about depression and its effects on your life. This book offers absolutely no solutions, just platitudes!

I would have given it zero stars, but Amazon didn't give me that option.

This book was easy to read and helped me understand more about the side effects of medication and the impact depression can have on relationships. I liked reading the questions/answers that were provided but I wish there were more tips on how to maintain my relationship through my depression. I would recommend this to someone who wants more of an overview/clinical view on depression. For those of you who want tips on how to strengthen your relationship, look elsewhere...

This book is a godsend. I am struggling with a husband who is depressed and this is the first book I found that addressed the problems of intimacy when a spouse is depressed. The panel of experts gave thoughtful and helpful answers. Most of all, it was hopeful and reassuring to know that I am not alone.

The poems in The World's Tallest Disaster seem to me very often word by word perfect, poems that knocked the breath out of me a little. In the spirit of Plath and Larkin, the poems can be caustic, funny, and beautiful (and yeah even cruel) all at the same time. They bring to life a consistent personality behind the words, even though, as Pinsky states in the introduction, the poems don't belong to any one particular school. The voice or persona (or whatever you want to call it) is blunt and trustworthy with an eloquent and disarming honesty. The language is always there. It's the best collection I've read in years.

Might as well just buy the book now. Even if you don't like poetry, years from now--when she's anthologized as one of our great contemporaries--Marvin's debut collection will be worth quite a penny.

If you do like poetry (for reasons other than that recommended by your financial advisor), then you're also in luck. Within these pages are 40 crisp, little works of art. Each one a microcosmic, exacting sculpture of words. Tiny chocolate treats cooked by a mad chef. (Quite mad). Yes, underneath the formal plasticine wrapping is nothing less then pure, chaotic screaming.

The result is addiction. Take for example, a golden nugget called "The Anniversary".

The poem begins with the Romantic-esque woe of "Disappointment with the lack of stars." And like the Romantic sing-song of Prufrock's opening, "Let us go then, you and I/When the evening is spread out against the sky" that quickly hinges from sweet to 20th Century rationalism-gone-wrong with the following line "Like a patient etherised upon a table;" Marvin too hinges her tone from Romantic to a part Plathian/part Verunica Salt nature, as she demands "where's the moon when I call it?/Perhaps it's not up to being the color/I want tonight: bloody orange, peeling light." That's only the beginning of a sharp poem filled with intense passion and lines like "I wear his eyes like rings/on my hands. I sew years into a dress."

I won't write an entire thesis for an amazon.com review, but bear in mind, this is one of those rare books whose poems can be read alone, when in a foul mood; or together, sprinkling rose petals on a lover's body. I look forward to a lifetime of reading her work.

Whether they know it or not, people want to read poems that aren't merely well-crafted, or smart, or humorous, or self-aware, or imagistic, or aware of the tragedy in our lives, or aware of the "limitations of language" (whatever that means). People settle for those things because they have grown to expect only those things from poetry ... to tolerate a certain well-mannered lifelessness. But what people really want, and need, is to read poems that are human. Poems (like the ones in this book) that are funny, angry, melodramatic, precise, contradictory, and, above all, interesting ... precisely all the things we want from, and expect in, an exceptional, complicated human being responding to life and the people in it. The poems in this book are particularly interesting, and moving, because they are not only so unafraid in their humor, ambition, precision, visuality and utterly self-aware melodrama to be fully human, but are also incredibly well-crafted, jeweled even (which is why criticizing the author of this book for having studied fiction -- a fact one would never know from the poems -- seems especially silly, and motivated by pure jealousy and pique). When I read this startling book (all the more startling for the fact that it is a first effort), I think of Auden, and Plath, masters of their craft who filled their finely-honed poems with the most contemporary objects and feelings. The poems in World's Tallest Disaster settle for nothing less. Read this book because it's more like the most intense, painful and rewarding aspects of life than most contemporary poetry; because the poems are also well-made objects which one can both admire and be pleased to be inside of; and because it's the first effort of a real poet who is going to be here doing this very important work for us for a long time to come.

Pinsky should take some time out to rest his ego and perhaps he will get back to thinking seriously about poetry rather than himself. "Jersey Rain" was bad, but this very small book with very big type is worse. The Narcissist is definitely in.

Sober, judicious, temperate, suave, Pinsky considers poetry's place in our high-tech democracy with all the passion of a required civics course. Nary an insight will trouble anyone's sleep in NPR, MacNeill/Lehrer America, and that's a shame, because poetry at its best is a whole lot hotter than that. Pinsky's a deft explainer and he keeps his good-natured balance in the midst of a very acrimonious and fragmented field. But I think those qualities mitigate against the kind of fire we need to shake poetry loose from the warm academic middle, whose virtues and limitations Pinksy embodies in every line of his prose.

Short, punchy, and nicely designed. Pinsky doesn't waste words. If you want to read a modern manifesto in defence of poetry, this is it. It's easy to dump on Pinsky because he's in the public eye so much, but this at least shows he's there because he has a brain. And who can complain about a poet being a star?