Despair, mania, rage, guilt, derangement, fantasy: poetry is our most
intimate, personal source for the urgency of these experiences. Poems
get under our skin; they engage with the balm, and the sting, of
understanding. In The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall--its title inspired by a
Gerard Manley Hopkins poem--acclaimed poet Robert Pinsky gives us more
than 130 poems that explore emotion at its most expansive, distinct, and
profound.
With seven illuminating chapters and succinct headnotes for each poem,
Pinsky leads us through the book's sweeping historical range. Each
chapter, with contents chronologically presented from Shakespeare to
Terrance Hayes, Dante to Patricia Lockwood, shows the persistence and
variation in our states of mind. "The Sleep of Reason" explores sanity
and the imagination, moving from William Cowper's "Lines Written During
a Time of Insanity" to Nicole Sealey's "a violence." "Grief" includes
Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs last in the Door-yard Bloom'd" and Marie
Howe's "What the Living Do," and "Manic Laughter" highlights both Lewis
Carroll and Martín Espada. Each poem reveals something new about the
vastness of human emotion; taken together they offer a sweeping ode to
the power of poetry.
Guided by "our finest living example of [the American civic poet]"
(New York Times), The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall demonstrates how
extreme feelings can be complementary and contradicting, and how poetry
is not just an expression of emotion, but emotion itself.
