Review by New York Times Review
CONTEMPORARY American poetry is sometimes panned for being mundane. With all the splendor and terror in the world, why should we care about some guy's memories of high school, or the quality time he spends with his cat? Glancing over it, you might suspect that Edward Hirsch's poetry would lend evidence to this view. Hirsch will begin a poem with a line like "Today I am pulling on a green wool sweater" or "Traffic was heavy coming off the bridge." Neither opening seems to burn with that hard, gemlike flame. But in Hirsch's work, things are not always what they seem. Certainly, his poems work to dignify the everyday. But they do more than that. What makes Hirsch so singular in American poetry is the balance he strikes between the quotidian and something completely other - an irrational counterforce, the "living fire" that gives its name to his new selected poems. That phrase appears in "Wild Gratitude," the title poem of Hirsch's 1986 volume. On its surface, the poem seems to be about, well, a guy spending time with his cat. But as he listens to her "solemn little squeals of delight," he begins to remember the 18th-century English visionary and madman Christopher Smart, who in his most famous poem, "Jubilate Agno," venerated his own cat, Jeoffry. The memory leads to a chain of associations, and the poem ends in a nearly epiphanic moment: This passage could stand as an emblem for all of Hirsch's poetry. Literary and allusive, but also domestic and intimate, as it rises toward praise, Hirsch's voice resounds with both force and subtlety. One of the pleasures of reading the new selected poems is the chance to see that voice develop and then range freely and surprisingly. Most poets are hot one minute and cold the next, depending almost on the day of the week. But Hirsch is worth reading chronologically. He not only gets better with each new book; he also provides a kind of model for the growth of poetic intelligence. The poems selected from his debut, "For the Sleepwalkers," remain accomplished by any measure. As its title suggests, the collection thrives on a nocturnal uneasiness, a white heat that emerges during white nights. Here is a young poet learning to find the vatic in the ordinary, often by looking a little awry at the world, as in "How to Get Back to Chester," when he describes the "greasy moon floating / like a tire over the highway." In the best poems from "Wild Gratitude," his second book, Hirsch gains a new openness. He now has a facility for inhabiting distinctly various tones, and this talent glimmers throughout the volumes, that follow. In a poem called "A Short Lexicon of Torture in the Eighties," for example, Hirsch strings together the euphemistic names for methods of torture, fashioning a kind of antic dance step, meant to expose the dark side of Reagan-era prosperity. In "The Welcoming," a narrative about adoption, Hirsch moves from a comic litany of bureaucratic hassles to a gorgeous and rapturous crescendo upon the arrival of his adopted son. As Hirsch enters his mature style in the '90s, his tonal shape-shifting begins to inform the thematic structures of whole volumes. "On Love," published in 1998, includes both poems about Hirsch's middle-class Jewish boyhood in Illinois and a series spoken by great poets and thinkers (from Diderot to Baudelaire to Gertrude Stein) who all, in intricate forms like pantoums and sestinas, address the subject of love. In his next book, "Lay Back the Darkness," Hirsch shimmies behind the imaginative world of his previous collection: if he wrote a whole book on love, he'll now write one about loss, grief and evil. The poems never become lugubrious, since Hirsch lightens the gloom with moments of humor and meditative calm. But the darkness is real, and this poet approaches it with his eyes open. He has a quality that exists for Latin American and Eastern European poets but is rare among their American counterparts. I mean a levity that remains entirely disabused by the horrors of history. If Hirsch runs a risk, it's toward the rhetorical. For instance, in the poem "Solstice," when he describes an unnamed city as having a "brutal gaze" and then refers to fireworks as an "ecstasy," he depends on commonplaces to elicit feelings (in this case, feelings that cities are big and mean and that fireworks are really awesome). But maybe such risks are worth running. After all, commonplace is not cliché. Employed deftly, it can lend a simultaneous warmth and public resonance. These happen to be Hirsch's best characteristics. IN his most recent work, Hirsch decants his language down to a tonic simplicity. The newest poems in "The Living Fire" have the sparseness and inevitability of epigram or haiku, even when they don't inhabit those forms. The title poem of Hirsch's most recent stand-alone volume, "Special Orders," offers a fine example. The poem begins by recalling the poet's father, now deceased, working at a paper company. Here's how it ends: What makes this ending so poignant is the ambiguity Hirsch creates, while keeping his language utterly clear. The memory of the father both answers the son's search and fails to. The poet and the reader are left not with a cure for grief but with something much realer - a living image of a genuine, practical, admirable person. Giving shape tp the "uncontainable" forces of emotion and dream among the grit of actual fact turns out to be Edward Hirsch's most vital ambition. In 2002, Hirsch published "The Demon and the Angel," an extended essay on the sources of artistic inspiration. At the center of the book stands the figure of the duende, an earthy, mysterioso spirit said to appear to the artist during creative raptures. Lore of the duende long circulated among flamenco dancers, but was made famous in the 1930s by the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. In "The Demon and the Angel," Hirsch explains that García Lorca thought the duende, a creature of extremes, was incompatible with the middle style. But this American poet seems to take respectful exception to the Spanish master. Reading Hirsch's poems, you suspect that the duende has walked through the New York subway stations and Chicago parking garages, has hung out at baseball fields and at the movies, has haunted the stacks of public libraries and the paths through municipal parks. Hirsch situates himself between the ordinary and the ecstatic. The everyday and the otherworldly temper each other in these excellent poems, and American poetry gains new strength as a result. Hirsch's newest poems have the inevitability of epigram or haiku, even when they don't inhabit those forms. Peter Campion is the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize fellow at the American Academy in Rome. His most recent book of poetry is "The Lions."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 28, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
A poet's first selected collection is a landmark, and this incandescent gathering reminds readers of just how accomplished Hirsch was right from the start. In For the Sleepwalkers (1981), he writes, I've come here to stand / like a pilgrim, thus declaring his sense of awe and hope as he enters the realm of poetry and reaches out to poets who have gone before him. One such poet is Christopher Smart, who inspired the title poem in Wild Gratitude (1986), in which the key phrase, the living fire, now this book's resonant title, resides. For Hirsch, the poet is a night watchman, lifting a torch against the darkness. But both the ecstasy of fire and the fire of grief blaze and rampage in well-chosen poems from each of Hirsch's seven previous collections as he revisits scenes from his childhood and a broken marriage, and evokes with radiant insight dawn and dusk, desire and loss, and the endless struggle between body and mind. And Hirsch's brilliant, deeply pleasurable new poems create an arresting conflagration of scorching sorrow and sweetness, mischievous wit and retribution.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Hirsch, a longtime poetry teacher and now the president of the Guggenheim Foundation, is an accessible and widely beloved poet and advocate for poetry. His work combines a playful, tender sense of humor, awareness of Jewish heritage, love for and identification with Central European and Russian poetry, and an intimate American voice that seeks to elucidate what mysteries it can. This, his first retrospective collection, selects from each of his seven previous collections, published between 1981 and 2008. The early poems attempt to characterize people in terms of and against the everyday world that surrounds them, and the art that depicts that world, as in "Still Life: An Argument": "the knife/ keeps falling and falling, but never/ falls. That knife could be us." Middle poems pay homage to and learn from classical culture and world religions: "...I believe the saint:/ Nothing stays the same/ in the shimmering heat." More recent poems confront aging and family ("My father in the night shuffling from room to room/ is no longer a father or a husband or a son,// but a boy standing on the edge of a forest"), while the newest wonder about the poet's own mortality, and track love lost and found. Hirsch has many wise things to say; this book is a trove of them. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The poems in this new work span the years from 1981, when Hirsch published his first book, For the Sleepwalkers, to the present (represented by a section of new poems that open the book)-almost 30 years of work. This new volume takes us on a tour of Hirsch's growth and development as a poet. They are one poetic voice piecing together the fragments of a self, (re)considering a life; a psyche on its Jungian journey toward integration, almost rabbinical in its spiritual interrogations. Occasionally, the poems seem to rely on too easy, romanticized endings, but overall the poems, like "Abortion" (Night Parade), are unflinching. Steeped in the language and pictorial vibrancies of the visual arts, Hirsch allows himself to enter and be surrounded by whatever imagination has arranged for him on the mind's canvas. Verdict Though there are weaker moments, especially when he's working with form (the long new poem built of haikus falls into this category), there are also poems of brilliant strangeness and piercing truths- "Village Idiot" from the middle years and the recent "Last Saturday," when a "new exterminator arrives...so early, [and] without warning." The voice of the poet in these poems is hard on itself but also tenacious about the possibilities of hope. Highly recommended.-Susan Kelly-DeWitt, Univ. of California, Davis/Sacramento City Coll. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
