The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall: Poems at the Extremes of Feeling

by Robert Pinsky

A bold new anthology of poems that contend with the most extreme human emotions, from former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. 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.

Genres: Poetry

256 pages, Hardcover

Published October 22, 2019

About the author

Robert Pinsky is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. From 1997 to 2000, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Pinsky is the author of nineteen books, most of which are collections of his own poetry. His published work also includes critically acclaimed translations, including The Inferno of Dante Alighieri and The Separate Notebooks by Czesław Miłosz. He teaches at Boston University and is the poetry editor at Slate.
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Reviews

[Raul Pegan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this as a personal introduction to poetry, and I’m glad my random choice was the correct one. The anthology walks you through poems from all periods of time, but does not hold you hand while doing so. Many poems went right over my head, but the ones that did not made the experience worth it. I am eager to continue exploring this world by maintaining my newly formed habit of reading poetry before bed.

[Hannahrose]

I read this years back for school, and wanted to dive back into books I read for academic purposes to see if reading them in a more lax setting is different.

Some of these poems were deep and so touching, others made literally no sense???
I'm not a huge poetry gal so maybe this is why, but I still think most of the poems do evoke abyssal feelings, my favorite being "Funeral Blues by W H Auden.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's an interesting way to create an anthology. I enjoyed the poems, though many seem fairly dry, rather than emotionally extreme.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was not taken with this book. I liked the idea behind it, but the experience of the book would have been better if Pinsky had chosen fewer poems and wrote more detailed discussions of each poem. It was just too much of an onslaught of poems with very little discussion of why the individual poems deserved inclusion.

[corinne · Rating 3 out of 5]

- i liked the chronological arrangement of each section
- there was a nice variety in the style and tone of the different poems
- the notes about each poem were almost unnecessary because they were so brief
- most of them did not feel as if they were “on the extremes of feeling”

[Garry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked 16 of the 122 or so poems collected by Robert Pinsky for this anthology. An interesting selection with very little commentary by the editor.

[Kendra J Whitney · Rating 3 out of 5]

My niece and I swapped this back and forth making annotations, which was fun; about a fourth of them went over or heads entirely with archaic language but the ones that resonated stuck like a knife.

[Drew Cook · Rating 3 out of 5]

Despair in mid winter