Proverbs of Limbo, Robert Pinsky’s first new book of poetry in eight years, takes an original approach to the fraught, central matter of borders. In this collection, the poet mines limbal regions, those spaces between differences that can be at once generative and oppressive, enlightening and dark, exciting and fatal. For Pinsky, they include the familiar borders between demographic categories, as well as more personal borderlands, such as the fringes between family history and world history or personality and culture: a lifetime’s territories of inbetween. The title Proverbs of Limbo tips its hat, at an angle, to the great poet William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell. Blake’s jagged, contrary proverbs resist, from within, the binary rights and wrongs of conventional Christianity: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”; “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” Here, Pinsky embodies a different resistance to different conventions of understanding. “The Buddha,” begins the title poem, “is a liquor store / On a busy corner.”
