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Robert Pinsky is the Bruce Springsteen of poetry. Popular Populist, they've both been called. Put their photos side by side and these handsome strong-jawed guys look like brothers, or at least cousins.

One's from Long Branch, N.J., the other's from Freehold, N.J., small towns near Asbury Park. "I have a small town mind," declares Mr. Pinsky in his seventh collection, Gulf Music. "Like the Greeks and Trojans./ Shame. Pride. Importance of looking bad or good."

His voice, like Mr. Springsteen's, comes out of the people and goes back to the people. His lines can switch from words to music: "Mallah walla tella bella. Trah mah trah-la, la-la-la."

What gigs he gets! "I am not as yellow in complexion as my appearance on The Simpsons," he kids about the episode in which he voiced himself giving a poetry reading that Lisa Simpson attends. On The Colbert Report, he moderated a metaphor contest ("Meta-Free-Phor-All") between Stephen Colbert and Sean Penn.

As U.S. poet laureate (1997-2000), he traveled the country filming ordinary people reading their cherished poems. That Favorite Poem Project is still going strong online and on DVD. As I write this, Mr. Pinsky and the current poet laureate, Charles Simic, are doing "Words and Music" at the Jazz Standard in New York.

But here in my hand is Gulf Music. I'm reading "First Things to Hand," a seven-part poem describing, as the poet sits at his desk, the "proximate, intimate" things: "Book," "Glass," "Jar of Pens," "Photograph." Each rendered still life delights the eye, and certainly the ear:

O brood of line-scratchers, plastic

Scabbards of the soul, you have

Outlived the sword – talons and

Wingfeathers for the hand.

– from "Jar of Pens"

"Poem of Disconnected Parts" makes couplets out of details of oppression:

At Robben Island the political

prisoners studied.

They coined the motto Each one Teach one.

In Argentina the torturers demanded

the prisoners

Address them always as "Profesor."

"The Anniversary" remembers Sept. 11:

Some say the doomed firefighters

Before they hurried into the doomed

towers wrote

Their Social Security numbers on

their forearms.

We can imagine them kidding about it a little.

This poem is a blend of grief, rage, patriotism, hope, despair and snippets of "America the Beautiful" with Ray Charles singing and the Raelettes in sequins and high heels for a live performance.

Why despair? Mr. Pinsky answers, in a recent Guernica magazine interview, that it is in response to "activities of our government: deception, torture, suspension of rights, among them." He hopes the poems struggle against "quietism or surrender."

To give voice is the vital principle of this poet. His faith is in breath, his own and the readers'. He finds breath even in the word "thing" (in its forgotten meaning) and lifts a music of definition right out of the dictionary:

"Thing, thyngan: verb. From Old English thyngian, to parley, to assemble, to confer, to reach terms. To address, to give voice."

Now I think I'll get up and play the Boss' CD, The Rising. By the way, it's the Boss who's from Freehold, and Mr. Pinsky who's from Long Branch. The towns are 17 miles apart.

Isabel Nathaniel is the author of The Dominion of Lights, which won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for best book of poetry.

Robert Pinsky

(Farrar, Straus

and Giroux, $22)

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