Shruti Ravindran in Open:

In 2008, Mohammed Hanif blazed onto the literary scene with his exuberant, anarchic first novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, much like the mysterious plane crash in which Pakistan’s General Zia ul-Haq was killed in 1988, and which served as the novel’s peg. Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, the story of a nurse in a psychiatric ward in a Karachi hospital, is the follow up to his award-winning debut. A novel somewhat tenebrous in tone, its laughs feel sharp and foreboding, like spasms in the chest. One Pakistani critic appears to have felt the pain acutely, calling parts of it ‘grotesque’. Hanif, however, says he’s “pleased” with the charge, and talks of writing influences, the misery of living amid “good stories”, and about wanting to write the script of Pirates of the Caribbean 12.

Q What was the earliest clue you had that you wanted to write?

A Reading scraps of paper. Reading postcards addressed to other people. Reading and rereading a reproductive health magazine called Sukhi Ghar.

Q Is journalism the profession most suited to writing? What are the pitfalls?

A Journalism makes you sloppy and self-important; you are always in a hurry, you don’t get time for self-reflection. But if you are lucky, you might get to meet some interesting people and learn how to write a paragraph.

Q Which authors did you enjoy reading at a younger age?

A All Urdu writers. Colonel Muhammed Khan. Ibne Safi. Ismat Chugtai.

Q Which authors do you enjoy reading now?

A Bret Easton Ellis. Hanif Kureishi. Alan Bennett. Lorrie Moore.

More here.

Hani Yousuf in Himal Southasian:

Sitting on the floor of an ashram in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Ikhlaq Hussain tuned his student’s sitar, with his fingers passing over the strings. This is how he likes to begin his lessons. His student, Satch, is a yoga teacher and started to learn the sitar five years ago at the behest of his spiritual guru. Hussain sat bare-footed and cross-legged, clad in an orange tunic with vertical embroidery along the chest. He unscrewed one of two carved knobs on top of the instrument, rubbing a bit of blue chalk on it and then screwed it back into place. He fiddled some more, tightening the strings, his fingers checking to see whether they sing to his tune yet. Then, finally, a burst of melody. ‘I was waiting for that,’ said Satch with a slight laugh. This had been a stressful week for him, he said, but the sitar helped to calm him down. Satch said that Hussain has turned out to be a very different teacher than he had expected. ‘He didn’t teach me every single vibration,’ he said. ‘But he gave me a very solid structure. He’s very humble – he gives what he has learned from his father.’

Hussain moved to New York City from Karachi in October 2001, weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center. What sealed the deal was a 1999 visit to the US to perform for a fashion show being put together by Pakistani designer Noorjehan Bilgrami. At the time, home was becoming more frustrating by the minute: Pakistan, Hussain said, was an artistic and financial vacuum. In case the American dream turned out to be a nightmare, he told himself, he could always go back. By the time he got around to it, Muslims in New York were feeling particularly vulnerable, and his family and friends advised him not to make the move. Nonetheless, he packed his sitar and boarded a flight to New York, coming in on a tourist visa but eventually being granted a ‘green card’ for permanent residency due to his exceptional musical ability.

More here. (Note: Congratulations to dear friends Ikhlaq and Judit)

From The New York Times:

The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India By SIDDHARTHA DEB

Deb, the author of two novels and an associate professor at the New School, borrows his title from F. Scott Fitzgerald, and his mission is similar to Fitzgerald’s: to ponder, at intimate range, lives within a society in great ferment. “A country that has seen a sudden infusion of wealth and a rapid disengagement with its past tends to throw up people who are traveling very quickly and seem to have no clear antecedents,” Deb writes in the book’s first chapter, almost by way of laying out his thesis. This describes the Roaring Twenties as well as it describes India in the 21st century.

That splendid first chapter, titled “The Great Gatsby,” profiles the most Fitzgeraldian of Deb’s figures. Arindam Chaudhuri is hard to miss in India: He appears, in regrettable suits and a glossy ponytail, in large newspaper advertisements nearly every day, hawking the top-notch M.B.A. degrees his management institutes claim to dispense. Chaudhuri’s advertisements suggest snake-oil patter, so Deb patiently seeks to reveal the man within the salesman. Chaudhuri is, we find, startlingly insecure, so unsure of his place in modern India that he trusts no one and is driven by “this Manichaean idea of people divided into the loyal and the disloyal, of Arindam at odds with the rest of the world.” In a neat inversion, Chaudhuri makes his living off identical insecurities in his students — students who can scrape together his tuition, but whose English may not be quite be as good as their Hindi or who think they lack the sophistication required in India’s corporations. Many of Chaudhuri’s graduates can find employment only in his own enterprises, their salaries paid, in a sense, by their successors, the education-starved young men and women thronging the institute. The scheme in its entirety, Deb realizes, carries the sour whiff of Ponzi. (When this chapter was excerpted in the Indian magazine Caravan, Deb and the magazine were promptly sued by Chaudhuri; thanks to an injunction, the Indian edition of the book has been robbed of its first ­essay.)

More here.

Over at the NYT, a debate:

When the Cherokee were relocated from the South to present-day Oklahoma in the 1830s, their black slaves were moved with them. Though an 1866 treaty gave the descendants of the slaves full rights as tribal citizens, regardless of ancestry, the Cherokee Nation has tried to expel them because they lack “Indian blood.”

Akim Reinhardt over at his blog:

The political standing of the Freedmen’s descendants has long been a very disputatious subject in the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee, and Seminole nations. For their part, the Cherokee national government has recently decided that those descendants who cannot show any descent from actual Cherokees will no longer be citizens of the Cherokee nation. Those who can show Cherokee descent will maintain their citizenship.

This may sound harsh to many readers. But the issue comes down the rights of a sovereign nation to decide its own citizenship qualification. Indeed, the United States itself is currently debating a similar issue: should illegal immigrants who arrived as small children be granted limited citizenship rights such as drivers’ licenses and in-state college tuition rates despite their illegal status?

While Americans heatedly debate that issue, no one questions the right of the United States to decide the issue for itself.

However, Indian nations are still subject to American colonialism. I’ve locked horns with other scholars about this, but I believe it is an honest, real politik assessment; this case is just one among countless examples of ongoing U.S. disregard for Indian governments and of it forcing its policies upon them. The U.S. officially supports Cherokee citizenship for the descendants of freedmen. The Cherokee nation as bucked, and U.S. retribution for that is intense.

Jonathan Rée discusses the evoluton of atheist thought over the ages in New Humanist:

[Percy Shelley's] pamphlet on “The Necessity of Atheism,” published anonymously in 1811 when he was 18, got him expelled from Oxford and disowned by his family, but he stood by it all the same. He may not have been the first atheist to come out of the closet, but he was the first to flourish the title with bravado and panache. On the other hand there was less to his atheism than meets the eye. “It is a good word of abuse,” he said, and he deployed it to advertise his revulsion from the Christian idea of a god who created the world and established the distinction between good and evil. But strictly speaking he was not so much an atheist as a pagan theist. His denial of God, he explained, “must be understood solely to affect a creative deity,” while the “hypothesis of a pervading spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.” In reflective moments he preferred to call himself a deist.

If the world’s first celebrity atheist was a deist then the word “atheism” seems to be in trouble. Hence the rise of the term “new atheism” to distinguish atheists who really mean business from those who prefer to hedge their bets. Like “atheism” itself, however, “new atheism” began life with negative connotations. It can be traced back to the 17th century, when it – or rather its French equivalent – was used to alert Christians to the threat of Spinozism. But nouvel athéisme was itself a dark phrase, since Spinoza believed passionately in something called God, though he shocked the orthodox by identifying it with nature as a whole rather than a transcendent supernatural agency. During the 19th century, as Spinoza came to be viewed as a pious mystic rather than a raucous infidel, the “new atheist” tag was transferred first to proponents of the mutability of species, then to Auguste Comte and the positivists, followed by the indomitable secularists Harriet Martineau and George Holyoake, Spencerian evolutionists and Darwinian natural-selectionists, and eventually Friedrich Nietzsche and his enigmatic hero Zarathustra.

Katrien Schaubroeck reviews Ronald Dworkin's Justice for Hedgehogs, in Metapsychology:

Justice for hedgehogs is written in a clear and engaging style, and it discusses the big questions of life, which are of interest to everyone, but the book is nevertheless mainly directed at a professional audience, working in political and legal theory, moral philosophy and meta-ethics. The book contains Dworkin's views on human dignity, the meaning of life, moral obligation, democracy, liberty and equality, the authority of law and many other valuable things. His conviction that the truth about each of these things is coherent and mutually supporting (that is, his belief in the unity of value) enables him to write an all-inclusive value theory merging ethics, morality, legal and political philosophy and even aesthetics. The glue is a particular understanding of 'interpretation', and the belief that that is what lawyers, artists, critics, historians, philosophers, moral agents (all of us) do: they interpret, as opposed to scientists who investigate. Interpreting is an essentially normative activity in Dworkin's value account of interpretation, because it makes the success of a particular interpretation dependent on the standard set by the best account of the value being served by interpretation in the genre to which the particular claim belongs. For instance, interpreting what another person says in a normal conversation succeeds when one grasps what this person really intends to say, because communicating intentions is the point (or value, Dworkin thinks that intrinsic and justifying goals of interpretation coincide) of conversational interpretation. In the different interpretive genre of law the actual mental states of legislators do not determine the best interpretation of a particular law because the point of legal interpretation differs from the purpose of conversational interpretation. Also moral reasoning is a matter of interpreting, namely of finding an interpretation of concepts like generosity, kindness, rights and duties that identifies and serves the value of moral reasoning best. If moral reasoning and legal judging are interpretive activities, there is no good reason why we should think it inevitable that legal requirements and moral obligations sometimes conflict. All it takes is another, and better, interpretation of the value served by these practices. Interpretation knits values together.

If coherence were the sole criterion, one would think that several sets of beliefs resulting from interpretation could be equally successful. But Dworkin is not only a holist about value, but also an objectivist.

Ashley Mears in the NYT [photo from Wikimedia Commons]:

AS the designers, stylists and editors of Fashion Week pack up to leave New York City today, one group of participants isn’t going anywhere: hundreds of young models, the surplus labor of the fashion industry.

Ten years ago, I was one of them. When I told my dad excitedly that I would be walking in a fashion show — which paid in dresses instead of money — he summed it up succinctly: “That and a buck will get you a cup of coffee.”

Fashion Week, despite bringing over $400 million to the city each year, is unprofitable work for most of the people wearing the designs. Because modeling is freelance work done on a per-project basis, models don’t receive benefits, have little control over the conditions of their work and never know when their next job is coming. They are arbitrarily selected and easily dismissed. And vast disparities exist in payments among models who do equivalent work; for the same show, top models can earn between $1,000 and $5,000, while others are not paid at all. Some models even work under arrangements that recall indentured servitude: they are in debt to their agencies for visa expenses, plane tickets, apartment rentals, even the cost of bike messengers who transport their portfolios to and from offices.

Fashion is a glamorous industry, but rub off the sheen, and quite another scene emerges.

Alan Glynn in The Independent:

Published in 1925, 'The Great Gatsby', a “consciously artistic achievement”, is a study of the power of illusion. It's a deconstruction of our dreams – of romance, of identity, even of consciousness. It's a love story, an American fable and an echo chamber of the 20th century. For these reasons it is also one of those rare books that you can read at different times in your life, and each time it'll do something different to you. When you're young, Gatsby's desperate pursuit of Daisy might break your heart. When you're older, the fragility of Gatsby's reinvented self might crack your soul. Whenever you do read it, though, you'll never be in any doubt that you're reading something extraordinary. If the book is tugging at your heart, you'll find the language lush and iridescent, and the imagery sensuous, with its calibrated system of blues and yellows, of eyes and water, of honey and straw. If it's chipping at your soul, you'll find the language weighted and resonant, and the imagery quite simply unforgettable, with its poetic elevation of the quotidian to the level of the profoundly philosophical.

In fact, with the elaborate but unstrained imagery of the Valley of the Ashes and the eyes of Dr TJ Eckleburg, Fitzgerald pretty much did what Joyce did in 'Ulysses' and Eliot in 'The Waste Land'. By pitching an all-seeing God against an all-pervading advertising billboard, he looks back in sadness to an imagined lost world, but also looks forward in anxiety to a burgeoning new one. But let's not forget Jay Gatsby. Whenever I revisit the book I imagine that this time, somehow, it will all work out for him. 'The Great Gatsby' retains that tension, that pull on the reader, taking us back, every time, to this blue lawn, and the green light at the end of Daisy's dock.

More here.

From Science:

This video may be the closest you come to a visit with a real-life Tatooine. Astronomers have discovered the first planet that, like Luke Skywalker's fictional home world in Star Wars, orbits two suns. The stars are a binary pair: They are about 1.5 and 4.5 times smaller than our own sun, and they orbit each other every 41 days, causing brightness dips that have been detected by the Kepler space telescope. Kepler also spied additional dips, produced when a Saturn-sized planet transits across the stars every 229 days. Both stars and planet orbit in the same plane, suggesting they formed together from a single spinning disk of gas and dust, researchers report today in Science. Until now, astronomers weren't sure whether or not planets would be able to form around binary stars. In particular, they thought that when the stars were in an eccentric orbit, as is the case here, they would strongly perturb dust particles that might prevent their coalescence into larger bodies. Kepler was lucky to find the Tatooine planet: Because of our slowly changing view of the system, there will be no planetary transits visible between 2018 and 2042.

A Hunger So Honed

Driving home late through town
He woke me for a deer in the road,
The light smudge of it fragile in the distance,

Free in a way that made me ashamed for our flesh—
His hand on my hand, even the weight
Of our voices not speaking.

I watched a long time
And a long time after we were too far to see,
Told myself I still saw it nosing the shrubs,

All phantom and shadow, so silent
It must have seemed I hadn’t wakened,
But passed into a deeper, more cogent state—

The mind a dark city, a disappearing,
A handkerchief
Swallowed by a fist.

I thought of the animal’s mouth
And the hunger entrusted it. A hunger
So honed the green leaves merely maintain it.

We want so much,
When perhaps we live best
In the spaces between loves,

That unconscious roving,
The heart its own rough animal.
Unfettered.

The second time,
There were two that faced us a moment
The way deer will in their Greek perfection,

As though we were just some offering
The night had delivered.
They disappeared between two houses,

And we drove on, our own limbs,
Our need for one another
Greedy, weak.

by Tracy K. Smith
from The Body's Question

I won’t lie to you — the day I started reading this book, I was tripping. In Book IV of The Odyssey, as Menelaus and Telemachus weep over their fallen comrades, Helen slips into their wine a drug that undoes “every grief and rage” and dries a man’s tears though his brother or son be slain before his eyes. Called nepenthe by poets, it’s known as oxycodone to us moderns. Helen got hers from Egypt, but I got mine from Walgreen’s. I’d just had dental surgery, so naturally I reached for two things that always make me happy, an opium derivative and poetry. They work even better in combination; just ask E. A. Poe. Not that, in this instance, a pharmaceutical boost was needed. I liked Yusef Komunyakaa immediately when I read Dien Cai Dau (1988), fell hard for him with Neon Vernacular (1993), and decided I wanted to be him when I grew up after Talking Dirty to the Gods (2001). So, naturally I swam, through ebbing pain and growing bliss, toward The Chameleon Couch, his thirteenth book of poems. As I read, though, I thought, dang, this is hard. And beautiful as well, and often funny.

more from David Kirby at the LA Review of Books here.

On May 30th, as the sun beat down on the plains of eastern Pakistan, a laborer named Muhammad Shafiq walked along the top of a dam on the Upper Jhelum Canal to begin his morning routine of clearing grass and trash that had drifted into the intake grates overnight. The water flow seemed normal, but when he started removing the debris with a crane the machinery seized up. He looked down and saw, trapped in the grates, a human form. Shafiq called some colleagues, and together they pulled out the body. Occasionally, farmers and water buffalo drown in the canal, float downstream, and get stuck in the grates, but never a man in a suit. “Even his tie and shoes were still on,” Shafiq told me. He called the police, and by the next day they had determined the man’s identity: Syed Saleem Shahzad, a journalist known for his exposés of the Pakistani military. Shahzad had not shown up the previous afternoon for a television interview that was to be taped in Islamabad, a hundred miles to the northwest. His disappearance was being reported on the morning news, his image flashed on television screens across the country. Meanwhile, the zamindar—feudal lord—of a village twenty miles upstream from the dam called the police about a white Toyota Corolla that had been abandoned by the canal, in the shade of a banyan tree. The police discovered that the car belonged to Shahzad. Its doors were locked, and there was no trace of blood.

more from Dexter Filkins at the New Yorker here.

“Having labored in the dusty groves of academe for over twenty years, I felt – as a new millennium unfolded – a desire to write more directly and personally than had previously been the case.” Terry Castle is as good as her word. These largely autobiographical essays (six short, the seventh very long) are at times extremely personal, strong, provocative, and sexually explicit. At the same time they are ruminative, questioning, open. I doubt if her particular groves were ever dusty. Part of the charm of her book comes from Castle’s willingness to think aloud, to entertain doubt and uncertainty, and to be alert to the dangers of self-censorship, even while exercising it at times, she says, to protect the privacy of other people. A “late developer”, Castle’s homosexual awakening was tentative, but blossomed at graduate school in the upper Midwest, where an affair with a closeted older woman – “the professor” of her title – lowered a difficult backdrop against which her subsequent relationships played themselves out (the stage is now more happily occupied by Blakey, whom Castle married a few years ago in San Francisco). Certainly “the professor” did much to determine Castle’s choice of dissertation topic: “Richardson’s Clarissa (1749) – a massive, morally ambiguous, relentlessly tragic epistolary novel about an intelligent young woman who is tricked, seduced, and harried to death by a charming amoral rake. Gosh, I wonder what made me choose that for a subject”.

more from Angus Trumble at the TLS here.

Chandran Kukathas reviews Larry May, Genocide: A Normative Account in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

The Polish lawyer and Holocaust survivor, Raphael Lemkin, coined the term 'genocide' in a book published in 1944 on Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.[1] Lemkin devoted his energies over the next four years to agitating for the recognition of this crime by international law and was instrumental in the drafting and eventual promulgation of the 1948 Genocide Convention. Since then, legal analysis of this controversial notion has grown as the term has come to occupy a distinctive place in law and, no less importantly, in popular discourse. Everyone knows the term 'genocide'. Over the past 60 years there have been countless historical studies of particular genocides, as well as numerous comparative discussions, notably Ben Kiernan's Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur.[2] Yet while historians, lawyers, psychologists, sociologists, political scientists and international relations theorists have published extensively on the question of genocide, philosophers have been conspicuously silent on the subject. Larry May's study is the first substantial philosophical work on genocide.[3] This is surprising given the controversy that has surrounded the concept from its very beginnings. It is not so much that disciplinary boundaries matter, or that lawyers and historians are incapable of conceptual analysis. It is rather that there are questions that have preoccupied philosophers that are thrown into particularly sharp relief by the problem of genocide, and there is much that philosophers can contribute — and learn — by paying greater attention to this moral notion.

Larry May's philosophical study is an outstanding contribution to our understanding of genocide, as well as to our appreciation of a number of theoretical problems that are addressed in the book.

George Soros in Project Syndicate:

To resolve a crisis in which the impossible has become possible, it is necessary to think the unthinkable. So, to resolve Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis, it is now imperative to prepare for the possibility of default and defection from the eurozone by Greece, Portugal, and perhaps Ireland.

In such a scenario, measures will have to be taken to prevent a financial meltdown in the eurozone as a whole. First, bank deposits must be protected. If a euro deposited in a Greek bank would be lost through default and defection, a euro deposited in an Italian bank would immediately be worth less than one in a German or Dutch bank, resulting in a run on the deficit countries’ banks.

Moreover, some banks in the defaulting countries would have to be kept functioning in order to prevent economic collapse. At the same time, the European banking system would have to be recapitalized and put under European, as distinct from national, supervision. Finally, government bonds issued by the eurozone’s other deficit countries would have to be protected from contagion. (The last two requirements would apply even if no country defaulted.)

All of this would cost money, but, under the existing arrangements agreed by the eurozone’s national leaders, no more money is to be found. So there is no alternative but to create the missing component: a European treasury with the power to tax and, therefore, to borrow. This would require a new treaty, transforming the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) into a full-fledged treasury.

Julia Grønnevet in Guernica:

The last victim was buried on August 18th, and the international media is long gone from Norway. But Norwegian media are still compulsively following every development in the Anders Behring Breivik case. While the rest of the world is consumed with the 9/11 anniversary, the Norwegian papers are writing that the gunman who shot 68 kids on Utøya and set off a massive bomb in central Oslo wanted to wear white tie and tails to his court date on August 19th. “This is the most formal dress for men,” his lawyer Geir Lippestad writes in a letter to the police, “and will not be offensive to the court, or demeaning or disturbing. On the contrary, the dress will show that the accused takes the process very seriously, and wishes to be presentable as he faces the court.” The article is accompanied by one of those pictures of Breivik that has become so familiar by now, the pale face, blond hair and queasy smile of a satisfied Norwegian man. The photo appears to have been taken indoors with a flash, the colors are over bright and the details are crisp in the wrong way. If this photo were taken with a camera using black and white film it would be a picture of a 1940s gentleman. Most Norwegians my age grew up with that sort of photo hanging on the wall, photos of our grandparents and their generation, the ones who faced The War. Our ancestors’ blue eyes turn colorless in grayscale.

There was only one War when I grew up, and it marked my grandparents so strongly it was the explanation for their every eccentricity. The slices of bread at their house were thin and crumbly, because during The War they had had to save on the food. Their multi-room walk-in pantry, and my aunts’ pantries (they remembered rationing) were always stocked with incredible amounts of food that they bartered for with their fisherman neighbors. Dead bodies could have fit into the industrial freezers that were in the basement of my grandparents’ farmhouse, the ancestral home of the Grønnevets, Sunnmøre on the northwest coast of Norway. Forget about buying German cars—where I grew up, German tourists were not to be spoken to and The War was remembered at every meal.

From Jadaliyya:

JADALIYYA: What made you write this book?

HAMID DABASHI: This book is very much a product of the Bush era (2000-2008) — a record of my fears and trembling at the sight of a criminally delusional man at the helm of an imperial killing machine and lacking any moral conception of what it was he was doing when he ordered the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, two catastrophic decisions that Afghans and Iraqis continue to pay for with their lives. I was aghast at the sight of the mass frenzy that accompanied those invasions, the barefaced banality of those who supported it (even some of the most progressive American intellectuals considered the Afghan invasion as a case of “just war,” as in fact later some leading Arab intellectuals were duped into supporting the US/NATO invasion of Libya), and above all the criminally complicitous comprador intellectuals like Fouad Ajami, Kanan Makiya, Ibn Warraq, Azar Nafisi, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, ad nauseum who were aiding and abetting in manufacturing consent for those wars. They were doing so in the name of criticizing militant Islamism, or misogynist patriarchy, or undemocratic practices and human rights abuses that their American and European employers — and by “employers” I mean the lucrative market that was receptive to their treacheries and made them bestsellers in Bush’s America — were in fact partially instrumental in causing, conditioning, and sustaining.

I recall reading about a panel in Washington DC in which Azar Nafisi had come together with one neocon illiterate or another to discuss one thing or another about “Islam” that set my antennae up and got me thinking about the duet they were singing. This was before the events of 9/11, or the US-led invasion of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), and before she wrote and published the now infamous Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), which prompted my al-Ahram essay on it, “Native Informers and the Making of American Empire” (2006) a couple of years later, which then became the basis of Brown Skin, White Masks.

More here.

Donald Brown in The Quarterly Conversation:

In 1996 Robert Pinsky published The Figured Wheel, a collected poems comprising his first four books of poems that also included some new work; the next year he would become the Poet Laureate of the United States. Perhaps not coincidentally, his next volume did not appear until 2001, the year after his tenure as Laureate ended. Pinsky achieved more visibility in the latter role than many another poet who has held the post, all in an effort to increase the viability of poetry in America. His serious attention to the task has earned Pinksy the epithet “civic poet” as an acknowledgement of the degree to which, as poet, critic, and proselytizer for poetry, he is able to express a convincing sense of poetry as a taught and learned cultural asset. Reading Pinsky, one tends to reflect on early, schoolroom encounters with poetry in poems offered not as hermetic repositories of private arcana but as encounters with language that create a vital sense of cultural heritage in “the best that has been thought and said.”

More here. [Photo shows Pinsky.]