Customer Reviews

Special Orders: Poems

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I found this beautiful collection of poems deeply moving, and curiously comforting. I believe anyone growing older and regretting missed opportunities, and missed friends and family, will appreciate the simplicity and skill of these poems. NOT a book of poems about Death, but a clear demonstration of the value of remembering and observing things going on around us. A sensitive gift for yourself and your best friends.

With hard work and luck, every once in a while an artist may be struck by the kind of creative lightning that results in a breakthrough work, which is at once startlingly new and large, even while retaining the artist's distinctive and recognizable voice. Edward Hirsch's new book, Special Orders, is such a work.

In broad outlines, the poems in Special Orders recount a man's paralyzing crisis of spirit brought on by a life deeply lived and considered, yet unfulfilled. From this point of crisis, the poet leads us on a journey through a dark land of confusion and self-loathing, until - redeemed by love - we arrive at a new place of enlightened and exuberant optimism. Hirsch's art makes the crisis feel real, the journey persuasive, and the enlightenment earned.

What is new and remarkable about Special Orders is its deeply personal story, and the stripped down and urgent language with which Hirsch tells it. Along the way from crisis to exultation, the poems in Special Orders reveal the artist adapting his powers to a new challenge. Mr. Hirsch has always won praise for his mastery of poetic technique and form, and for his ability to inhabit a wide range of personae. But in Special Orders, he stands naked in his own skin, and speaks in the voice of an American everyman. And yet, through the new poems, there are the trademarks of what make Hirsch a distinctive and important artist - the richness of metaphor, the breadth of learning and inquiry, the sheer intellectual and artistic daring.

This is a poet at the top of his game.

Edward Hirsch, a longtime teacher of creative writing at the University of Houston, was recently interviewed on NPR on the occasion of the publication of his recent book of poetry, Special Orders. While all poems in a volume of poetry are rarely of equal attraction to a reader, this slim collection comes close. Dealing with the issue of loss in its many expressions and origins, this is, nevertheless, not a depressing collection. It is more a book of gentle sadness and retrospection, rather than unremitting and savage pain, in confronting issues we all eventually must address. Especially evocative, the opening poems, Special Orders and Cotton Candy, vividly paint sensory images of long past and cherished moments that we all can touch a personal version of in memory. Self-Portrait and A Few Encounters with My Face are strong and express well the sad confusion of standing in the bathroom at 3 a.m. and wondering "Who is that moonlit stranger staring at me through the fog of a bathroom mirror." Recommended.

I have read his stuff for over 20 years and it always hits home. The beauty is that you see Hirsch in all stages of life:child, young man, and now creeping beyond middle life, "I'm now more than halfway to the grave/but I'm not half the man I meant to become." The reflections on his father are only the type of reflections that come from the perspective of age and are deeply moving. A sadness permeates the collection. I wish there were a few more poems of hope and adaptation---another "Memorandums of my Affection." But no matter. He shows us the universal through his life. Worthwhile.

I heard Hirsch on NPR and decided to buy his book. I like the first section best, where he describes people, places and events. Poems about his interior monolgue are less interesting.