Slight volume of Pinsky peotry adds up to a quite a lot

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"Jersey Rain"

by Robert Pinsky

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $21

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There is no poet more visible than Robert Pinsky, who in his two terms as U.S. poet laureate is everywhere, it seems, promoting the ancient but still vital art of trying to make words bridge the gap between the world within and the world without.

But it has been four years since his last book, "The Figured Wheel: Collected Poems 1966-1996." Despite the appearance of many fine individual poems in some of the best publications, one could begin to fret that his dedication to poetry in general was costing him the time for his own verse.

Not to worry. Although its two dozen or so poems add up to a rather slight volume, "Jersey Rain," his new book, shows that whatever his production lacks in quantity is more than balanced by its quality.

Any of the poems here is good enough to be the centerpiece of almost any other poet's work. A solid half-dozen are as good as anything Pinsky has written, and that is very good indeed.

In the long prose poem "An Alphabet of My Dead," Pinsky courts sleep by reciting an alphabetical list of people he has known who are now dead.

"I tell them over not as a memorial comfort, and not for the souls of the dead, but as evidence that I may be real," he says, as if by placing himself in the continuity of mortality he becomes somehow more alive.

Yet it is an ironic way to pursue the oblivion of sleep. He goes letter by letter, from "Harry Antonucci," an Italian boy "who used to play basketball at the Jewish Community Center," to the poets Elizabeth Bishop and e.e. cummings, to "X the unknown ancestors of my eight great-grandparents, unseen multitudes who have created my body," and finally to "Zagreus, ancient god of the past, dead one."

His litany wavers between rumination and prayer, as our late-night thoughts interweave the profane and the sacred. Finally, this effort to bring order, however arbitrary, to the randomness of his acquaintances and affections is an indirect tribute to the power of poetry to give form to the formless.

In contrast to the prose of "An Alphabet of My Dead," the rhymed iambic pentameter couplets of "The Hall," along with its short, declarative sentences, seem old fashioned.

Pinsky taps into the power of traditional cadences and tones to connect us with the wisdom of ancient myths, which remain the best way we have of reconciling the paradoxes of life.

He begins, "The hero travels homeward and outward at once, / Master of circumstance and slave to chance." If "the hero" is some version of our consciousness, who would argue that it isn't so, that our inner life is not somehow both autonomous and contingent?

"The shifting hero wanders alien places, / Through customs of cities and histories of races," he continues, and at last concludes that the hero, like our errant consciousness taking our multifarious gleanings to heart, at last "recollects, travels and summons together all - / All manners of the dead and living, in the great Hall."

The title poem, "Jersey Rain," beautifully fulfills one of the oldest purposes of poetry, the discovery of a correspondence between nature and the human heart, but in a way that seems utterly new, utterly timeless. He writes of the rain, "The source of art and woe aslant in wind / Dissolves or nourishes everything it touches. / What roadbank gullies it doesn't mend / It carves the deeper, boiling tawny in ditches." Even aside from the aptness of the metaphor, what a perfectly observed picture. In making the rain something more than rain, Pinsky never lets us forget that it is, truly, rain as well, as he shows it "boiling tawny in ditches."

The rain's many attributes, indistinguishable from those of the heart, accumulate as the poem goes on. At last it is "descending destroyer, arrowed source of passion, / Silver and black, executioner, source of life." Rain, but more than rain, as anything fully observed and experienced is both itself and something more that we make it. Robert Pinsky has not only promoted the vital art of using words to bridge the gap between the world within and the world without; he has added something invaluable. --------------------------- Author appearance

Robert Pinsky will read from his work at 3 p.m. Wednesday at the Redmond Regional Library, 15810 N.E. 85th St., Redmond. Information: 425-885-1861. Pinsky will also read at 7 p.m. in Kirkland at Kirkland Performance Center, 350 Kirkland Ave. Information: 425-893-9900.