At the Foundling Hospital : Poems Paperback / softback

"Since the death of Robert Lowell in 1977, no single figure has dominated American poetry the way that Lowell, or before him Eliot, once did . . . But among the many writers who have come of age in our fin de si cle, none have succeeded more completely as poet, critic, and translator than Robert Pinsky." --James Longenbach, The NationWith all the generosity and mastery we have come to expect from our three-time Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky has written a bold, lyrical meditation on identity and culture as hybrid and fluid, violent as well as creative: the enigmatic, maybe universal, condition of the foundling.

At the Foundling Hospital considers the foundling soul: its need to be adopted, and its need to be adaptive.

These poems reimagine identity on the scale of one life or of human history: from "the emanation of a dead star still alive" to the "pinhole iris of your mortal eye." What is a particular person?

How unique? What is anyone born as? Born with? Born into? The poems of Robert Pinsky's At the Foundling Hospital engage personality and culture as improvised from loss: a creative effort so pervasive it can be invisible.