Edward Hirsch
Edward Hirsch featured in:
The Best American Poetry: 2006,
guest editor Billy Collins;
and in
The Best American Poetry: 2005,
guest editor Paul Muldoon.
Edward Hirsch featured as guest editor:
Best American Poetry: 2016
Edward Hirsch
Poetry.
Prose.
Time Line.
Books.
Earthly Measures.
For the Sleepwalkers.
Lay Back the Darkness.
On Love.
Special Orders.
The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems.
The Night Parade.
Wild Gratitude.
Earthly Measures (1994)
For the Sleepwalkers (1981)
Lay Back the Darkness (2003)
- Dedicated to his father, Kurt Hirsch (1913-2002), and his son Gabriel Hirsch.
- Two long poems ("The Desire Manuscript" and "The Hades Sonnets")
that explore stories from The Odyssey, The Aeneid,
Metamorphoses, the Persephone legend, and the Orpheus legend.
The strength of this ancient stories leads to poems that are less self-absorbed than
Hirsch's poems are elsewhere, and the poems are the better for it.
- The remarkable 15-page (10-part) "Two Suitcases of Children's Drawings from Terezin, 1942-1944"
poem, which may well be Hirsch's greatest poem in its insight and generosity, its recognition of
painful history experienced by the hurt and hopeful young of the WWII Nazi concentration camps.
- The above three unusually long poems
("The Desire Manuscript", "The Hades Sonnets", and
"Two Suitcases of Children's Drawings from Terezin, 1942-1944")
all have numbered sections. While these sections reinforce each other and benefit from
being read in sequence, my perception is that each numbered section
is equivalent to (and could have been) a separate poem;
I counted each as such in the statistics.
- In addition to exploring the use of rhyme, Hirsch puts more than
a third of the poems into the sonnet
form (typically in four triplets with a closing couplet, but
he uses several other line groupings).
- Poems of loss.
- Favorite poems are the above-mentioned three long poems. Another is:
See below for statistics
and journals of first publication.
On Love (1998)
The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010)
Special Orders (2008)
- Dedicated to Laurie Watel.
- Poems that recall his father (fathers?) and childhood;
poems that recall places he visited (many of these poems are dedicated to other poets);
poems inspired by paintings;
poems on his own aging and insomnia;
poems on grief and ultimately a possible peace.
- Favorite poems:
- (p.3) "Special Orders"
- (p.13) "The Swimmers"
- (p.21-24) "Soutine: A Show of Still Lifes", particularly for its final stanza:
So many brushstrokes in a painting,
and so much blood. So much art
in a still life, and so much death.
|
- (p.37-39) "Late March", particularly for:
I stood with the people onshore and waved
goodbye to the travelers.
Some were jubilant;
others were brokenhearted.
I have always been both.
...
I felt lucky to see it off
and bereft when it disappeared.
|
See below for statistics
and journals of first publication.
The Night Parade (1989)
Wild Gratitude (1986)
- Winner of National Book Circle Critics Award.
- Dedicated to his parents, Irma and Kurt Hirsch, his sisters (Arlene and Nancy Hirsch),
and to Janet Landay.
- Poems of recollection; persona poems of mentally incapacitated people.
- Capitalizes each line, which sometimes makes the poems difficult to read.
- Favorite poems:
- (p.64-66) "Three Journeys" (remembering the visionary John Clare).
- (p.71) "In Spite of Everything, the Stars".
See below for statistics
and journals of first publication.
|
| Earthly Measures (1994)
| For the Sleepwalkers (1981)
| Lay Back the Darkness (2003)
| On Love (1998)
| Special Orders (2008)
| The Night Parade (1989)
| Wild Gratitude (1986)
|
| Number of pages of poems
| | | 63 | | 57 | | 69
|
Number of multi-part poems
(plus the total numbered sections counted as separate poems below)
| | | 3
(7 + 10 + 10
= 27) | | 0 | | 2 (short,
consistent sections;
not counted as
separate poems)
|
| Number of poems
| | | 40 | | 40 | | 32
|
| Mean pages per poem
| | | 1.6 | | 1.4 | | 2.2
|
| Numbered sections
| | | 4 (untitled) | | 2 (also titled) | | 4 (untitled)
|
| Sonnets
| | | 15 | | 5 | | 0
|
| 2-lines/stanza
| | | 4 | | 8 | | 1
|
| 3-lines/stanza
| | | 7 | | 11 | | 3
|
| 4-lines/stanza
| | | 2 | | 4 | | 5
|
| 5-lines/stanza
| | | 0 | | 1 | | 4
|
| 6-lines/stanza
| | | 0 | | 1 | | 4
|
| 7-lines/stanza
| | | 0 | | 0 | | 2
|
| 8-lines/stanza
| | | 0 | | 0 | | 1
|
| 12-lines/stanza
| | | 0 | | 0 | | 1
|
| variable lines/stanza
| | | 12 | | 6 | | 8
|
| single-stanza
| | | 1 | | 3 | | 6
|
| 2 stanza
| | | 0 | | 0 | | 2
|
| 3 stanza
| | | 0 | | 2 | | 2
|
| 4 stanza
| | | 1 | | 4 | | 2
|
| 5 stanza
| | | 14 | | 8 | | 0
|
| 6 stanza
| | | 1 | | 1 | | 1
|
| 7 stanza
| | | 1 | | 4 | | 3
|
| 8 stanza
| | | 2 | | 4 | | 2
|
| 9 stanza
| | | 1 | | 0 | | 4
|
| 10 stanza
| | | 0 | | 1 | | 3
|
| 11 stanza
| | | 1 | | 2 | | 0
|
| 12 stanza
| | | 1 | | 3 | | 1
|
| 14 or more stanza
| | | 3 | | 1 | | 5
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Acknowledges first publications in:
Poet's Choice.
Poet's Choice (2006)
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- 1950
- Born in Chicago, Illinois.
- 1981.
- Poetry:
For the Sleepwalkers.
- 1986.
- Poetry:
Wild Gratitude,
which received
- the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets and
- the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University
- 1989.
- Poetry:
The Night Parade.
- 1994.
- Poetry:
Earthly Measures.
- Editing:
Transforming Vision: Writers on Art.
- 1998.
- Poetry:
On Love.
- 1999.
- Prose:
How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry.
- Prose:
Responsive Reading.
- 2002.
- Prose:
The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration.
- 2003.
- Poetry:
Lay Back the Darkness.
- 2004.
- Editing:
William Maxwell: Memories and Appreciation
(with Charles Baxter and Michael Collier).
- 2005.
- Editing:
Theodore Roethke: Selected Poems.
- 2006.
- Prose:
Poet's Choice.
- 2007.
- Editing:
To a Nightingale: Sonnets and Poems from Sappho to Borges.
- 2008.
- Poetry:
Special Orders.
- Editing:
The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology
(with Eavan Boland).
- 2010.
- Poems: The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems.
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Links and Books
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