Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky Speaks With Compassion To All. By Richard Siken The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, by Robert Pinsky (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Paper, $15. ONE WOULD IMAGINE the initial creative impulse that drives a young poet to put his or her pen to the pad for the very first time would be anything but the desire to speak for a nation about large social and political concerns. Love, you're thinking--yes, most certainly, love, a small love, a crush even, an audience of one to whom the poet confesses awkward and halting lines of desperate adolescent rapture--this, you're thinking, is where poetry begins. And yet, somehow, strangely and wonderfully, this is not where poetry ends. For certainly there are poets who've enlarged their audience beyond a single targeted beloved, poets who give personal resonance to public issues and engender a gesture of inclusiveness that allows them to speak to, or for, a nation. The fact that a poet can speak for an entire nation is striking in itself, but even more dazzling is the way in which such a voice develops. Last month Robert Pinsky was named the next poet laureate of the United States by the Library of Congress, which makes him, in effect, the authorized poetic voice of our nation for the upcoming year. So my first thought, aside from a selection by the librarian of congress, was "What gives Robert Pinsky the right to speak for me, or any of us?" And though I did have other questions in mind, this line of inquiry was of primary interest as I began to read his book of new and collected poems. The Figured Wheel includes Pinsky's four acclaimed books of poetry--Sadness and Happiness, An Explanation of America, History of My Heart, and The Want Bone--as well as a dozen new poems and a selection of his highly regarded translations. But, weirdly, they're arranged in reverse chronological order, so that as one reads further into the book, Pinsky and his voice get younger and younger. This doubling of narrative (moving forward in the book and backward in time) actually clarified things for me, for the developmental changes in Pinsky's work are subtle, and more easily noticeable in their subtraction. Even in his early work, Pinsky reveals a voice both reasoned and passionate, discursive and careful, taking on the themes of Jewishness, history, family, religion, tradition, and the intermeshed, interlocking lives of a community. It is not so much that his voice or themes change in his later work, because they don't. And it is not necessarily that age has brought him deeper wisdom in his later work, although they have. But, corny as it sounds, the difference between his earlier and later work is this incredible welling up of love. At his worst, and youngest, in his first book Sadness and Happiness, the scope of attention for Pinsky's affections lies within the realm of family and home town. These poems are good, though they don't risk much, relying mostly on the stance of witness or privileged observer, dealing with subject matter that, in the hands of a lesser poet, might seem overly indulgent. Had he stopped here, he would still have enjoyed a modest audience, for these poems are intelligent and well crafted; but with each subsequent book Pinsky's attention grows larger and more inclusive, and he relinquishes the role of distanced witness in favor of a more complicit, active participation. Certainly, observations about self and world are valid subject matter, but simplistic or didactic explanations, even when voiced with authority, rarely have the power to be much more than moralizing, let alone emotionally moving. There are some poems in this collection that seem to do little more than point a blaming finger at something bad, or heap praise on something already widely deemed as good. But the majority reveal a voice that acknowledges it's a part of the very thing it's investigating, and that the investigation has been instigated by a great compassion intent on not just celebration, but redemption. Robert Pinsky teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University, and has also authored two volumes of essays, The Situation of Poetry and Poetry and the World. He will begin his term as poet laureate this fall.

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