The Want Bone, Robert Pinsky’s fourth volume of poems, marks a departure for the fifty-year-old poet. Where his earlier poems are mostly occasional pieces dealing with the paraphernalia of everyday life—tennis, psychiatrists, and scenes from Pinsky’s hometown on the New Jersey shore are typical subjects—the poems collected here all explore a single theme, the theme of desire. Ranging widely over the field of human yearning, Pinsky writes of what it is to want. He is fascinated by the ardent source of our endeavors—the “glittering/ Zodiac of intentions” that animates everything we do. Pinsky’s earlier collections—Sadness and Happiness (1975), An Explanation of America (1979), and History of My Heart (1984)—were not bound together thematically in this way.
Yet however governed The Want Bone is by the theme of desire—and however much Pinsky illustrates his theme with religious and mythical imagery, also new terrain for him—most of the poems here have an admirably concrete and immediate feel. In the poem “Shirt,” for example, what Pinsky offers us is a catalogue of tangible attributes of this ordinary object. The result is a poem very much like a Pinsky poem of old:
The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians
Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band
Of cuff I button at my wrist.