Edward HirschThe Living Fire: New and Selected Poems

A great collection from a fabulous poet. This New and Selected includes poems dating from 1981 (For the Sleepwalkers) to shortly before its publication in 2010. There is a great variety of tone and form and subject matter here, really something for everyone.At the front there are some new poems, not printed in any other collection.Here are a few lines from "Forebodings":I don't mind the mindless fogbut my room at the top of the stairstilts like a broken boat at seaAll night I feel the homesick wavesand hear ravens scavenging in my sleep

I love reading poetry. So when I found this book on the Borders shelves several years ago, I wrote down the author's name and the title of the collection to put on my "To Read" book list. I ordered my copy over a year ago and I oftentimes, reread many of the poems. Even my husband loves to read some of these poems with me and has gotten a bit more into poetry after I introduced him to this book. I would recommend this book to my friends and family who would love to have some new poetry to read.

I liked the book but as always some are great some are not to my taste. Four more words are required it says, so rather than delete I have added four more words.

A surprisingly dull read. Although he has a reputation that places him at the top of American poetry, this book was pretty much an overworked disappointment. It made it to the used bookstore in my neighborhood in record time.

Beautiful pieces in here for lovers of poetry! I read the amazing Memorandums one day in a bookstore, and bought it because of that poem. I was not disappointed.

When I first came to Inprint, a literary arts organization in Houston, during the very hot summer of 1995, Ed Hirsch and his wife were my neighbors. And one morning, not long after I started on the job, Eddie brought me up to his study--a large room lined floor to ceiling, corner to corner, all four walls, with books--mostly poetry books. And he, knowing that I was an aspiring poet who moves at a glacial pace, made me a kind and completely overwhelming offer: that I should let him know if I ever wanted to look something up. It was daunting, and at that moment, the full magnitude of my ignorance was made manifest to me. I never took him up on it.But Hirsch, unlike many brilliant souls afflicted with a deep and subtle knowledge of their field, is able to use his diverse and profound understanding of poetry as an advantage, to inform and sustain his art. In the title poem of his second collection, Wild Gratitude, Hirsch sees in the mad 18th century poet, Christopher Smart, a kindred spirit; and the past and present merge to teach us "how to praise," Smart's cat, Jeoffry--"and [as Hirsch puts it] every creature like him"--that is, all who are attuned to the divinity and richness of the universe-- "wreathing themselves in the living fire."Even in a poem like "The Skokie Theatre," which portrays the dawning, in the flickering dark, of adolescent sexuality, he treats us to transformative images--longing, for example, expressed as a "deep foam filling my bones." I've never been able to shake that image, which is both weird and just right.In the unforgettable poem, "The Poet at Seven," Hirsch gives us a self-portrait of a child playing baseball with "concentration camp eyes" and "the typical blood of the exile, the refugee, the victim." This dark portrayal serves as a springboard for the potential liberation in the poem's final lines--the "ancestral lamentation" in the child, "a shadowy, grief-stricken need for freedom/ laboring to express itself through him." These yearnings, for liberation and spiritual ecstasy, course through Hirsch's work, and position him as one of our great contemporary transcendentalists.But there's so much more to what he does, as evidenced by this new volume,. Everywhere in it is a rich and constant interaction with writers and artists across the millenium, such as Paul Celan, Edward Hopper, Simone Weil, Heine, Diderot, Baudelaire, Leopardi, Brecht, Lawrence, Wilde, Homer, the painter Agnes Martin--the breadth of Hirsch's knowledge and his passionate sense of connection with these past masters gives one an inspiring sense of the timeless continuity of culture, tradition, and the history of ideas.In his more recent work, Hirsch has taken a step back from his earlier rhetorical richness to give us poems that are both startling and deeply moving in their directness and subtlety. I think, for example, of the poem, "More than Halfway," which ends with an existential Q&A, a kind of oblique cri de coeur: "What did I mean to say to darkness?// Death is a zero hollowed out of my chest./ God is an absence whispering in the leaves."This is a great book, and a great overarching look at the work of one of our best poets. I can't recommend it highly enough.

I very much enjoyed this compliation by Edward Hirsch. I can't say that I am a massive fan of poems but I found his work easy to read and enjoyable. For those who don't know Hirsch, it is easy to tell that he grew up in Chicago as a number of his poems allude to his time there. My favorite which is in this book is The Skokie Theater which I had to read several times. One because I have been to the Skokie Theater a number of times in my youth and two because of the experience he describes in that poem which I can't say happened to me there but when I was younger I probably wished a few times that it did. Take a read to find out more about what I mean. The other poems I found mostly enjoyable including a neat one about a fast break in a basketball game and several poems that referenced the Holocaust. Overall a very enjoyable selection of poems that are pretty easy to make your way through and are quite enjoyable. It was also named a New York Times Notable Book of 2010.

Full of praise and lament, wisdom, heartache and joy, these superbly-crafted poems remind us why Edward Hirsch is one of our best poets, and why The Living Fire is a thrilling masterpiece that's impossible to put down. Highly recommended.