SOURCE: "Explaining America: The Poetry of Robert Pinsky," Chicago Review, Vol. 33, No. 1, Summer, 1981, pp. 16-26.

In the following essay, Parini offers a positive assessment of An Explanation of America, praising his unique and original verse.

Robert Pinsky's book-length poem An Explanation of America falls somewhere into that magical fold of "major poetry": it offers a steadiness and wholeness of vision rare in contemporary poetry. Pinsky writes with a deeply humane sensibility, drawing new water from old wells, but also reaching into areas where nobody would have guessed that poetry could be found. "A country is the things it wants to see," he tells us, and the particulars of his America materialize before us as a necessary exterior analogue to the "common dream" of humanity.

Pinsky addresses the poem to his daughter, Nicole, saying: "I want our country like a common dream / To be between us in what we...