To the Editors:

In his December “Verse Chronicle,” William Logan writes of Robert Pinsky that in his new book (Gulf Music) he can be “a bit wild,” but that “his rashness is the soul of caution.” Odd, though, that the very brief samples of palpable wildness Logan quotes are not at all cautious—not, surely, if by cautious one means predictable or unlikely to challenge a reader’s comprehension. Perhaps Logan intends, with “soul of caution,” to suggest that, even where the poet juxtaposes or alludes with apparent abandon or recklessness, he allows his reader to discern an informing logic and thus to see that Pinsky really is up to something complicated, rich and plausible. And as that indeed is what is characteristically on offer in Pinsky’s 2007 volume Gulf Music, it is not easy to understand Logan’s objection. For a poet to insist that the wildness in a poem be controlled by an informing idea is not to be unduly cautious or timid.

Neither can this reader quite understand what precisely Logan objects to when he writes that “Shame cultures, in these days of honor killings, have a lot to answer for.” Suppose we agree with Logan there. Does it then follow—as Logan would have us believe—that the speaker in one of Pinsky’s poems, who describes himself as “a creature of shame,” can have no genuine or intellectually respectable reason for feeling shame when he considers the brutalities visited upon other human beings by persons who