Robert Pinsky's The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996 gathers together all his poetry to date, including twenty-one new poems. The critic Hugh Kenner, writing about Pinsky's first volume, described this poet's project as "nothing less than the recovery for language of a whole domain of mute and familiar experience." Transformation of the familiar and uttering of what had been mute or implicit within culture continue to be central to Pinsky's art.

New poems like "Avenue" and "The City Elegies" envision the city's mysterious epitome of human pain and imagination, forces that recur in "Ginza Samba," an astonishing history of the saxophone, and "Impossible to Tell," a jazz-like work that intertwines elegy with the Japanese custom of linking-poems and the American tradition of ethnic jokes.

A final section of translations includes renderings of poems by Czeslaw Milosz, Paul Celan, and others, as well as the last canto of Pinsky's award-winning version of the Inferno.