Customer Reviews

The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems

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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.

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.