In Proverbs of Limbo, Robert Pinsky blurs the line between self and other, present and past, and good and evil. The title invokes William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell but turns its interest to limbo, from the Medieval Latin word for “border.” These are poems that build borders before promptly effacing them.
The poems are thematically connected, often dropping a hint of a line only to return to it in a later stanza or poem — as if the book’s ideas are stuck in limbo themselves. One theme that the poems keep in rotation is Judaism. For example, the third stanza of “Branca” notes, “‘Speaking’ is the punchline of a Jewish joke.” The poem — which focuses on baseball players Jackie Robinson and Ralph Branca — doesn’t return to this joke until the third-to-last stanza, when it abruptly tells it without any lead-up:
In the joke, the person who answers the telephone
At Goldberg, Goldberg and Goldberg keeps replying
That Goldberg is out of the office. And so is Goldberg.
“Alright, then let me talk to Goldberg.” “Speaking.”
Pinsky leaves the reader in this limbo again in “Forgiveness,” when he alludes to an antisemitic remark made by John Keats: “Even poor John Keats, in his letters,/Enjoys a little minor Jew baiting./Who do I think I am to forgive him?” We are not told what Keats said, but we are told what to do with this information — that is, we’re to understand that the Jewish poet and the antisemitic poet are one: “After all, I am him. He too was the child/Of a New Jersey optician and please do me/A favor, don’t tell me No he wasn’t.” Pinsky circles back to what Keats has said fourteen poems later, in “Lenny Bruce”: “John Keats in a letter says that now he’s ready/‘To cheat as well as any literary Jew’ — /One more example, ho hum, how could it matter … ” These lines are embedded in a poem that ultimately praises Keats and pardons him “for being a shmuck.” The verdicts of these two poems ricochet off of each other until we are stuck in the merciful limbo of human contradiction.
Just as all things are in limbo, so too is suffering exerted on all things. Throughout the collection, poems address oppressions faced by Native Americans, Black Americans, Jews, and other groups. In the final poem, “At the Sangoma,” the speaker “asked the ancestors/About their suffering./Because it was ours, now/It is yours as the shape/Of your head is yours.”
As the collection explores this suffering, an important argument emerges: Jewish holiness is perhaps not one of separation but of commonality. “Beatitudes,” for example, connects a Yiddish insult to the heart of American poetry:
Praise my mother saying “schtitck pfaerd,”
To call someone a part of a horse
While not specifying the part,
Which makes it both more courteous
And funnier, in the way of Yiddish
And Emily Dickinson.
Likewise, “Obituary” ends with a meditation on the word nu that connects language across culture: “In Spanish and Yiddish, a word the sound of waiting/For what may be worth saying, which may be nothing.” Proverbs of Limbo sometimes gives us the punchline but makes us wait for the joke, and a charm of the book is that the reader senses that, by the time we do get to the joke, not only is it worth saying, but we realize that we’ve been waiting for it together in this limbo all along.
Allison Pitinii Davis is the author of Line Study of a Motel Clerk (Baobab Press, 2017), a finalist for the Berru Poetry Award and the Ohioana Book Award.
