Books by Edward Hirsch
A Poet's Glossary
A major addition to the literature of poetry, Edward Hirsch’s sparkling new work is a compilation of forms, devices, groups, movements, isms, aesthetics, rhetorical terms, and folklore—a book that all readers, writers, teachers, and students of poetry will return to over and over.
Hirsch has delved deeply into the poetic traditions of the world, returning with an inclusive, international compendium. Moving gracefully from the bards of ancient Greece to the revolutionaries of Latin America, from small formal elements to large mysteries, he provides thoughtful definitions for the most important poetic vocabulary, imbuing his work with a lifetime of scholarship and the warmth of a man devoted to his art.
Knowing how a poem works is essential to unlocking its meaning. Hirsch’s entries will deepen readers’ relationships with their favorite poems and open greater levels of understanding in each new poem they encounter. Shot through with the enthusiasm, authority, and sheer delight that made How to Read a Poem so beloved, A Poet’s Glossary is a new classic.
Copies
No copies available.
Poet's Choice
Edward Hirsch began writing a column in the Washington Post Book World called "Poet's Choice" in 2002. This book brings together those enormously popular columns, some of which have been revised and expanded, to present a minicourse in world poetry; Poet's Choice includes the work of more than 130 poets-from Asia and the Middle East to Europe and America, from ancient times to the present-and demonstrates how poetry responds to the challenges of our modern world. Rich, relevant, and inviting, the book reveals how poetry both puts us in touch with ourselves and connects us to each other.
I don't want to go on being a root in the dark,
Insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
Going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,
Taking in and thinking, eating every day.
I don't want so much misery.
I don't want to go on as a root and a tomb,
Alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,
Half frozen, dying of grief.
-from "WALKING AROUND" by PABLO NERUDA,
translated by ROBERT BLY
Copies
No copies available.
100 Poems To Break Your Heart
100 of the most moving and inspiring poems of the last 200 years from around the world, a collection that will comfort and enthrall anyone trapped by grief or loneliness, selected by the award-winning, best-selling, and beloved author of How to Read a Poem
Implicit in poetry is the idea that we are enriched by heartbreaks, by the recognition and understanding of suffering—not just our own suffering but also the pain of others. We are not so much diminished as enlarged by grief, by our refusal to vanish, or to let others vanish, without leaving a record. And poets are people who are determined to leave a trace in words, to transform oceanic depths of feeling into art that speaks to others.
In 100 Poems to Break Your Heart, poet and advocate Edward Hirsch selects 100 poems, from the nineteenth century to the present, and illuminates them, unpacking context and references to help the reader fully experience the range of emotion and wisdom within these poems.
For anyone trying to process grief, loneliness, or fear, this collection of poetry will be your guide in trying times.
Copies
-
$17.99
100 Poems To Break Your Heart
100 of the most moving and inspiring poems of the last 200 years from around the world, a collection that will comfort and enthrall anyone trapped by grief or loneliness, selected by the award-winning, best-selling, and beloved author of How to Read a Poem
Implicit in poetry is the idea that we are enriched by heartbreaks, by the recognition and understanding of suffering—not just our own suffering but also the pain of others. We are not so much diminished as enlarged by grief, by our refusal to vanish, or to let others vanish, without leaving a record. And poets are people who are determined to leave a trace in words, to transform oceanic depths of feeling into art that speaks to others.
In 100 Poems to Break Your Heart, poet and advocate Edward Hirsch selects 100 poems, from the nineteenth century to the present, and illuminates them, unpacking context and references to help the reader fully experience the range of emotion and wisdom within these poems.
For anyone trying to process grief, loneliness, or fear, this collection of poetry will be your guide in trying times.
Copies
No copies available.
Special Orders: Poems
In Special Orders, the renowned poet Edward Hirsch brings us a new series of tightly crafted poems, work that demonstrates a thrilling expansion of his tone and subject matter. It is with a mixture of grief and joy that Hirsch examines what he calls “the minor triumphs, the major failures” of his life so far, in lines that reveal a startling frankness in the man composing them, a fearlessness in confronting his own internal divisions: “I lived between my heart and my head, / like a married couple who can’t get along,” he writes in “Self-portrait.” These poems constitute a profound, sometimes painful self-examination, by the end of which the poet marvels at the sense of expectancy and transformation he feels. His fifteen-year-old son walking on Broadway is a fledgling about to sail out over the treetops; he has a new love, passionately described in “I Wish I Could Paint You”; he is ready to live, he tells us, “solitary, bittersweet, and utterly free.”
More personal than any of his previous collections, Special Orders is Edward Hirsch’s most significant book to date.
The highway signs pointed to our happiness;
the greasy spoons and gleaming truck stops
were the stations of our pilgrimage.
Wasn’t that us staggering past the riverboats,
eating homemade fudge at the county fair
and devouring each other’s body?
They come back to me now, delicious love,
the times my sad heart knew a little sweetness.
from “The Sweetness”
Copies
No copies available.
Special Orders: Poems
In these powerful and “achingly beautiful” (Booklist) poems of self-examination and openness from one of the cornerstones of the poetry world, Edward Hirsch assesses “the minor triumphs, the major failures” of his life, and the people and places that have colored it.
Copies
No copies available.
The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems
A rich and significant collection of more than one hundred poems, drawn from a lifetime of “wild gratitude” in poetry.
In poems chronicling insomnia (“the blue-rimmed edge / of outer dark, those crossroads / where we meet the dead”), art and culture (poems on Edward Hopper and Paul Celan, love poems in the voices of Baudelaire and Gertrude Stein, a meditation on two suitcases of children’s drawings that came out of the Terezin concentration camp), and his own experience, including the powerful, frank self-examinations in his more recent work, Edward Hirsch displays stunning range and quality. Repeatedly confronting the darkness, his own sense of godlessness (“Forgive me, faith, for never having any”), he also struggles with the unlikely presence of the divine, the power of art to redeem human transience, and the complexity of relationships. Throughout the collection, his own life trajectory enriches the poems; he is the “skinny, long-beaked boy / who perched in the branches of the old branch library,” as well as the passionate middle-aged man who tells his lover, “I wish I could paint you— / . . . / I need a brush for your hard angles / and ferocious blues and reds. / . . . / I wish I could paint you / from the waist down.”
Grieving for the losses occasioned by our mortality, Hirsch’s ultimate impulse as a poet is to praise—to wreathe himself, as he writes, in “the living fire” that burns with a ferocious intensity.
Copies
No copies available.
The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems
A comprehensive selection of one of our most beloved poet’s rich and significant body of work alongside a gathering of “brilliant, deeply pleasurable” new poems (Booklist).
Copies
No copies available.
Lay Back the Darkness: Poems
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 piece—a plea for his father, a victim of Alzheimer’s wandering the hallway at night—and 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.
Copies
No copies available.
Lay Back the Darkness: Poems
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 piece—a plea for his father, a victim of Alzheimer’s wandering the hallway at night—and 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.
Copies
No copies available.
Gabriel: A Poem
Longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award
Never has there been a book of poems quite like Gabriel, in which a short life, a bewildering death, and the unanswerable sorrow of a father come together in such a sustained elegy. This unabashed sequence speaks directly from Hirsch’s heart to our own, without sentimentality. From its opening lines—“The funeral director opened the coffin / And there he was alone / From the waist up”—Hirsch’s account is poignantly direct and open to the strange vicissitudes and tricks of grief. In propulsive three-line stanzas, he tells the story of how a once unstoppable child, who suffered from various developmental disorders, turned into an irreverent young adult, funny, rebellious, impulsive. Hirsch mixes his tale of Gabriel with the stories of other poets through the centuries who have also lost children, and expresses his feelings through theirs. His landmark poem enters the broad stream of human grief and raises in us the strange hope, even consolation, that we find in the writer’s act of witnessing and transformation. It will be read and reread.
Copies
No copies available.
Gabriel: A Poem
Longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award
Never has there been a book of poems quite like Gabriel, in which a short life, a bewildering death, and the unanswerable sorrow of a father come together in such a sustained elegy. This unabashed sequence speaks directly from Hirsch’s heart to our own, without sentimentality. From its opening lines—“The funeral director opened the coffin / And there he was alone / From the waist up”—Hirsch’s account is poignantly direct and open to the strange vicissitudes and tricks of grief. In propulsive three-line stanzas, he tells the story of how a once unstoppable child, who suffered from various developmental disorders, turned into an irreverent young adult, funny, rebellious, impulsive. Hirsch mixes his tale of Gabriel with the stories of other poets through the centuries who have also lost children, and expresses his feelings through theirs. His landmark poem enters the broad stream of human grief and raises in us the strange hope, even consolation, that we find in the writer’s act of witnessing and transformation. It will be read and reread.
Copies
No copies available.
The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology
by Edward Hirsch, Eavan Boland
An enlightening, celebratory anthology of the most classic and enduring of forms edited by two major poets. This illuminating anthology follows the sonnet through its various moments and makers over five and a half centuries. Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland, two of our foremost poets, focus on vicissitudes, paying particular attention to how individual poets―from Shakespeare to Strand―have claimed these fourteen lines: lengthened them, shortened them, elaborated on them, and, in turn, been defined by them. Three sections―"The Sonnet in the Mirror," "The Sonnet Goes to Different Lengths," and "The Sonnet extraordinary durability and its reinventions. The collection opens with personal introductions by the editors, and, in the appendix, they provide "Ten Questions for a Sonnet Workshop" to jump-start a conversation between students and teachers. With more than three hundred poems, The Making of a Sonnet guides readers through a vigorous adventures in craft and practice, right up to its extraordinary resurgence in contemporary poetry.
Copies
No copies available.
Stranger by Night: Poems
In his seventieth year, the award-winning poet looks back on what was and accepts what is, in a deeply moving and beautiful sequence about what sustains him.
Beginning with "My Friends Don't Get Buried," the lament of a delinquent mourner as his friends have begun to die, and ending with the plaintive note to self "don't write elegies/anymore," Edward Hirsch takes us backward through the decades in these memory poems of startling immediacy. He recalls the black dress a lover wore when he couldn't yet know the tragedy of her burning spirit; the radiance of an autumn day in Detroit when his students smoked outside, passionately discussing Shelley; the day he got off late from a railyard shift and missed an antiwar demonstration. There are direct and indirect elegies to lost contemporaries like Mark Strand, William Meredith, and, most especially, his longtime compatriot Philip Levine, whom he honors in several poems about daily work in the late midcentury Midwest. As the poet ages and begins to lose his peripheral vision, the world is "stranger by night," but these elegant, heart-stirring poems shed light on a lifetime that inevitably contains both sorrow and joy.
Copies
No copies available.
The Essential Poet's Glossary
A Poet’s Glossary was an extraordinary achievement that continues to stand as a definitive source for poets and poetry lovers alike. Here, The Essential Poet’s Glossary gleans the very best from that extraordinary volume.
"An instant classic that belongs on the bookshelf of every serious poet and literature student."―Washington Post
Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets Edward Hirsch has compiled poetic terms spanning centuries and continents, including forms, devices, movements, aesthetics, rhetorical terms, and folklore. Knowing how a poem works is crucial to unlocking its meaning―entries will deepen readers’ relationships with their favorite poems and open greater levels of understanding in each new poem they encounter.
Shot through with the enthusiasm, authority, and sheer delight that made A Poet’s Glossary and How to Read a Poem so beloved, this Essential edition is the book that all readers, writers, teachers, and students of poetry will return to again and again.
Copies
No copies available.
My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy
From the award-winning poet, dark comic microbursts of prose deliver a whole childhood, at the hands of a not quite middle-class Jewish family whose hardboiled American brutality and wit were the forge of a poet's coming of age
"My grandparents taught me to write my sins on paper and cast them into the water on the first day of the New Year. They didn’t expect an entire book," Hirsh says in the "prologue" to this glorious festival of knife-sharp observations. In micro chapters—sometimes only a single scathing sentence long—with titles like "Call to Breakfast," "Pay Cash," "The Sorrow of Manly Sports," and "Aristotle on Lawrence Avenue," Eddie's gambling father, Ruby, son of an iron-smelter, schools him and his sister in blackjack; Eddie's mom bangs pots and pans to wake the kids (to a breakfast of cold cereal); Uncle Bob, in the collection business, can be heard threatening people on the upstairs phone; and nobody suffers fools or gives hugs. In this household, Eddie learned to jab with his left and hook with his right, never to kid a kidder, and how to sneak out at night.
Steeped in rage and exuberance, Yiddishkeit and Midwestern practicality, Hirsch's laugh-and-cry performance animates a heartbreaking odyssey, from the cradle to the day he leaves home, armed with sorrow and a huge store of killing poetic wit.
Copies
-
$29.00
The Night Parade: Poems
"Edward Hirsch's gifts include an emotional richness coupled with a precise sense of language and metaphor, which makes his best poems wonderful to read."
—Stephen Dobyns, New York Times Book Review
"Hirsch possesses an uncanny vividness of memory springing, it seems, from an infinite fund of affection and sadness...There is a wonderful simplicity and clarity in the best of these poems."
—Liz Rosenberg, Philadelphia Inquirer
Straightforward and precise, these poems...beckon the reader with their immediacy...With humility and passion, Hirsch illuminates the contradictory resilience and weakness of the human spirit."
—Publishers Weekly
Copies
No copies available.
Best American Poetry 2016 (The Best American Poetry series)
by David Lehman, Edward Hirsch
The premier anthology of contemporary American poetry continues—guest edited this year by award-winning poet Edward Hirsch, a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the president of The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
The Best American Poetry series is “a vivid snapshot of what a distinguished poet finds exciting, fresh and memorable” (Robert Pinsky); a guiding light for the mood and shape of modern American poetry. Each year, this series presents essential American verse and the poets who create it. Truly the “best” American poetry has appeared in this venerable collection for over twenty-five years.
A poet of decided brilliance since his 1981 debut collection, For the Sleepwalkers, Edward Hirsch curates a thoughtful selection of poetry for 2016 and an Introduction to be savored. Jumpha Lahiri said of Hirsch, “The trademarks of his poems are…to be intimate but restrained, to be tender without being sentimental, to witness life without flinching, and above all, to isolate and preserve those details of our existence so often overlooked, so easily forgotten, so essential to our souls.” Hirsch’s choices for this collection reflect the soul of poetry in America. As ever, series editor David Lehman opens this year’s edition with an insider’s guide and a thoughtful contemplation of poetry today.
Copies
No copies available.
The Heart of American Poetry
An acclaimed poet and our greatest champion for poetry offers an inspiring and insightful new reading of the American tradition
We live in unsettled times. What is America and who are we as a people? How do we understand the dreams and betrayals that have shaped the American experience? For poet and critic Edward Hirsch, poetry opens up new ways of answering these questions, of reconnecting with one another and with what’s best in us.
In this landmark new book from Library of America, Hirsch offers deeply personal readings of forty essential American poems we thought we knew—from Anne Bradstreet’s “The Author to Her Book” and Phillis Wheatley’s “To S.M. a Young African Painter, on seeing his Works” to Garrett Hongo’s “Ancestral Graves, Kahuku” and Joy Harjo’s “Rabbit Is Up to Tricks”—exploring how these poems have sustained his own life and how they might uplift our diverse but divided nation.
“This is a personal book about American poetry,” writes Hirsch, “but I hope it is more than a personal selection. I have chosen forty poems from our extensive archive and songbook that have been meaningful to me,
part of my affective life, my critical consideration, but I have also tried to be cognizant of the changing playbook in American poetry, which is not fixed but fluctuating, ever in flow, to pay attention to the wider consideration, the appreciable reach of our literature. This is a book of encounters and realizations.”
Copies
-
$26.00
The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration
by Edward Hirsch, Liz Darhansoff
A work of art, whether a painting, a dance, a poem, or a jazz composition, can be admired in its own right. But how does the artist actually create his or her work? What is the source of an artist's inspiration? What is the force that impels the artist to set down a vision that becomes art?
In this groundbreaking book, Edward Hirsch explores the concept of duende, that mysterious, highly potent power of creativity that results in a work of art. With examples ranging from Federico García Lorca's wrestling with darkness as he discovered the fountain of words within himself to Martha Graham's creation of her most emotional dances, from the canvases of Robert Motherwell to William Blake's celestial visions, Hirsch taps into the artistic imagination and explains, in terms illuminating and emotional, how different artists respond to the power and demonic energy of creative impulse.
Copies
No copies available.
How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry
A masterful work by a master poet, this brilliant summation of poetry and human nature will speak to all readers who long to place poetry in their lives.
How to Read a Poem is an unprecedented exploration of poetry and feeling. In language at once acute and emotional, National Book Critics Circle award-winning distinguished poet and critic Edward Hirsch describes why poetry matters and how we can open up our imaginations so that its message can make a difference. In a marvelous reading of verse from around the world, including work by Pablo Neruda, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, and Sylvia Plath, among many others, Hirsch discovers the true meaning of their words and ideas and brings their sublime message home into our hearts.
"The answer Hirsch gives to the question of how to read as poem is: Ecstatically."—Boston Book Review
Copies
No copies available.
Chinese Writers on Writing (The Writer's World)
As the United States and China move toward an expansion of political and economic relations, interest in China and its culture has never been greater. Chinese Writers on Writing makes a contribution in illuminating this corner of the globe through the works of some of its finest writers. With more than half the works appearing in English for the first time, Chinese Writers on Writing features authors such as Mo Yan, whose book Red Sorghum was made into an award-winning movie by the same name; Lu Xun, known as the Chinese George Orwell; and Gao Xingjian, recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature. Edited by award-winning poet Arthur Sze, this is the first collection that brings together material by writers reflecting on their work, their processes, and the challenges of writing under China’s political system. This is the fifth volume in the highly acclaimed Writer’s World Series.
Copies
No copies available.
Polish Writers on Writing (The Writer's World)
by Adam Zagajewski, Edward Hirsch
Featuring 20th-century writers, including Nobel Prize winners Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska, as well as celebrated poet Zbigniew Herbert and internationally renowned Bruno Schulz, this collection captures the brilliance and originality of a literary culture rightly considered one of the most important and influential of our time. These writers are branded by the political realities of their country creating literature out of the brutality of the World War II, under the numbing and inhibiting Communist reign, and finally within a free society, but one freighted with the weight of its history.
Copies
No copies available.
Earthly Measures Poems
“These are poems of immense wonder and rigor. To say that they are religious poems is only to recognize their grandeur and generosity, and their heart-breaking longing.”
—Patricia Hampl, The New York Times Book Review
“With Earthly Measures, Edward Hirsch breaks through the ring of fire and captures his Muse. The voice is now uncannily his own; uncanny because we believe we have heard it before, yet the accents are unearthly and utterly fresh. Like his poem on Art Pepper, this voice also hears the chords of Stevens and Celan, but knows that ‘play solo means going on alone, improvising.’”
—Harold Bloom
“Edward Hirsch is one of the finest poets we have! He has wonderful gifts to offer us: a strong, touching narrative voice; alert, mindful eye; the moral energy that informs his manner of writing and his choice of subjects; a desire to reach his readers, bring them into the world he observes, creates.”
—Robert Coles
“I can’t think of any contemporary whose poems have such an unfeigned urgency of feeling. At the same time, Hirsch’s poems have a considered richness in them, and greatly repay rereading.”
—Richard Wilbur
Copies
No copies available.
To a Nightingale: Poems from Sappho to Borges
Uniting the voices of thirty master poets, this sweeping anthology explores the influence of literature’s most celebrated bird.
To a Nightingale traces the presence of this richly interpreted muse through the words of Ovid, Hafiz, Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Keats, T.S. Eliot, W.S. Merwin and many more. The collection reveals a time-honored, poetic discussion of beauty, grief, solitude, and artistic expression--a discussion that so inspired some of the world's great poets.
Copies
No copies available.
Hebrew Writers on Writing (The Writer's World)
Hebrew Writers on Writing offers a fresh look at well-known figures such as Haim Nahman Bialik and Yehuda Amichai, while also introducing a host of fascinating yet little- or never-before translated writers. Drawing from essays, letters, notebooks, poems, interviews, and other sources, it begins in early 20th-century Warsaw, wanders through the formative years of Hebrew modernism in Europe and Palestine, and explores the charged complexity of contemporary Israel. In the process, it probes, as no English-language volume has before, the shifting cultural and political landscape Hebrew emerged from, providing readers with an intimate vision of a startlingly rich and diverse body of work. These selections from 49 writers have been rendered by a group of some of the finest English translators in the field, and each piece is introduced by editor, noted poet, and MacArthur fellow Peter Cole.
Copies
No copies available.