Summary

Edward Hirsch's sixth collection is a descent into the darkness of middle age, narrated with exacting tenderness. He explores the boundaries of human fallibility both in candid personal poems, such as the title piecea plea for his father, a victim of Alzheimer's wandering the hallway at nightand in his passionate encounters with classic poetic texts, as when Dante's Inferno enters his bedroom: When you read Canto Five aloud last night in your naked, singsong, fractured Italian, my sweet compulsion, my carnal appetite, I suspected we shall never be forgiven for devouring each other body and soul . . . From the lighting of a Yahrzeit candle to the drawings by the children of Terezin, Hirsch longs for transcendence in art and in the troubled history of his faith. In "The Hades Sonnets," the ravishing series that crowns the collection, the poet awakens full of grief in his wife's arms, but here as throughout, there is a luminous forgiveness in his examination of our sorrows. Taken together, these poems offer a profound engagement with our need to capture what is passing (and past) in the incandescence of language. From the Hardcover edition.

Author Biography

Edward Hirsch has published five previous books of poems: For the Sleepwalkers (1981), Wild Gratitude (1986), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Night Parade (1989), Earthly Measures (1994), and On Love (1998). He has also written three prose books, including How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), a national best-seller, and The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration (2002). A frequent contributor to leading magazines and periodicals, including The New Yorker, DoubleTake, and American Poetry Review, he also writes the Poet’s Choice column for the Washington Post Book World. He has received the Prix de R

I Am Going to Start Living Like a Mystic The Desire Manuscripts

(12)

The Craving

(1)

The Ravishment

(1)

What the Goddess Can Do

(1)

The Sentence

(1)

In the Mourning Fields

(1)

After All the Orphic Enchantments

(2)

The Regret

(4)

The Widening Sky

(1)

My First Theology Lesson

(1)

Lay Back the Darkness

(1)

Reading Isaac Babel's Diary on the Lower East Side

(3)

Yahrzeit Candle

(1)

The Magic Mirror

(2)

Work Song

(2)

Wheeling My Father Through the Alzheimer's Ward

(1)

My Father's Childhood

(2)

Dates

(6)

The Horizontal Line

(7)

The Evanescence

(3)

Two Suitcases of Children's Drawings from Terezin, 1942--1944

(18)

Under a Wild Green Fig Tree The Hades Sonnets

(1)

Self-portrait as Persephone

(1)

Franz Marc's Lost Painting Orpheus with the Animals (1907--1908)

(1)

The Forgetfulness Chair

(1)

The Asphodel Meadows

(1)

Self-portrait as Eurydice

(1)

Self-portrait as Eurydice, II

(1)

Self-portrait as Eurydice, III

(1)

To Demeter

(1)

Self-portrait as Hades and Persephone

(1)

Voyage

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Excerpts

I Am Going to Start Living Like a Mystic

Today I am pulling on a green wool sweater
and walking across the park in a dusky snowfall.

The trees stand like twenty-seven prophets in a field,
each a station in a pilgrimage--silent, pondering.

Blue flakes of light falling across their bodies
are the ciphers of a secret, an occultation.

I will examine their leaves as pages in a text
and consider the bookish pigeons, students of winter.

I will kneel on the track of a vanquished squirrel
and stare into a blank pond for the figure of Sophia.

I shall begin scouring the sky for signs
as if my whole future were constellated upon it.

I will walk home alone with the deep alone,
a disciple of shadows, in praise of the mysteries.

From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpted from Lay Back the Darkness: Poems by Edward Hirsch
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.