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Gabriel: A Poem Paperback – March 1, 2016

by Edward Hirsch (Author)

53 customer reviews

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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.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Hirsch’s poem Gabriel, is as raw, as relentless in its inconsolability, as anything I’ve read.” --David Ulin, Los Angeles Times

"Part tribute; part existential howl; part intellectual investigation of our most primal emotions; part novella-like, buoyant, unsentimental romp through the life of Hirsch’s ‘wild spirit, beloved son…’”--Emily Rapp, New York Times Book Review

"Hirsch's lightening-lit portrait of and surging lament for his hurricane of a son is a courageous, generous, and reverberating epic of fatherly love and mourning."--Donna Seaman, Booklist, starred reivew

"Embedded within Gabriel is a picaresque novella about a tempestuous boy and young man, a part Hirsch calls 'the adventures of Gabriel...' [The poet] Eavan Boland described Gabriel as 'a masterpiece of sorrow. . . the creation of the loved and lost boy is one of the poem's most important effects.'"--Alec Wilkinson, The New Yorker

"Unpunctuated, unrhymed triplets serve Hirsch’s grief and tell his story well. . . a near-unforgettable book-length verse memoir describing the life and death, the rambunctious childhood, the adventurous youth, the funeral, and the enduring memory, of the poet’s only son."--Publishers Weekly

"Gabriel resists sentimentality at every line break, though it is the most heartfelt poem I have read."--Tim Adams, The Observer

“Gabriel is an exquisite document of loss.”--Michael Andor Brodeur, Boston Globe

From the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Edward Hirsch has published eight books of poetry and five books of prose. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

From the Hardcover edition.

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Product details

Paperback: 96 pages
Publisher: Knopf; Reprint edition (March 1, 2016)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0804172870
ISBN-13: 978-0804172875
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.4 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 53 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #278,139 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #66 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > Themes & Styles > Family
- #127 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > Themes & Styles > Death, Grief & Loss
- #396 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > Love Poems

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Theda Bara

Calling death by its right name

September 7, 2014

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This poem reminded me of something. I pulled Emily Dickinson, John Ciardi's Dante, and Felix Feneon's Novels in Three Lines off the shelf. Dickinson was too nineteenth century, but plenty of truth there. Ciardi had the three-line stanza, but he was doing Dante and had to haul out every word he knew. Feneon was closest. As a journalist, he had to call death by its right name.

In his new book-length poem Gabriel, Edward Hirsch has given his dead son a proper send off and he has begun the task of placing the boy's life in some sort of perspective. It takes a special lens. Gabriel was an adopted child born with a mysterious developmental disorder that made him impetuous, impatient, and loud. No school could hold him. He never had the natural fear of danger that keeps most of us alive. He was never, his father tells us, scared enough of drug dealers, one of whom sold him the tab of GBH that carried him off. I'm pretty sure Mr. Hirsch would never use even that level of metaphor for his son's death. The poem has no sentimentality, no anodyne phrases, no metaphors or euphemisms for death. The death of Gabriel was ugly, sudden, frightening, and final. When I read the poem, I felt lucky to glimpse this remarkable child's life. Fierce energy, sleepless always, loud opinions about everything and everyone, he was loved and his father writes, with an even, steady hand, of his life and his death.

What I value most in this poem, after learning about what happened to Gabriel, is the use of language. It is restrained conversation, quiet, precise and respectful. And it's all here. Hirsch places Gabriel as a baby in the context of his childless marriage, the joy of the baby's arrival and the slow realization that Gabriel would be a challenge in every sense. We wend our way through Gabriel's childhood and confront the utter helplessness adults -- parents, teachers, psychiatrists -- inevitably felt when they tried to help him. As he became a young man, Gabriel described most encounters with those who tried to help with outspoken contempt. He would never accept when anyone, or the world at large, told him no. No, his father tells us, was just a meaningless word spoken on the way to yes. We share the clutching panic of parents whose developmentally disabled son disappears, but at an age that makes him too young and too old to warrant police intervention. Thankfully, the parents' investigation of the last number called on their son's phone leads them to the emergency personnel who were called the night Gabriel collapsed and died. To know, after so many days of not knowing, is an inexpressible relief.

This is a book to be reread periodically. It is a comfort for those whom the syrupy ways we usually talk about death mean nothing, less than nothing. Everything about this poem is an attempt to hold a life still for a moment. A life that was never actually still, or quiet, until it finally was.

38 people found this helpful39 people found this helpful

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A Beautiful Poem about the Death of a Son

November 20, 2014

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It is almost impossible to adequately describe or do justice to Edward Hirsch's heart-wrenching elegy about the short life and death of his son Gabriel. Consisting of three-lined stanzas with no punctuation that extends for 78 pages, it is part biography, part ode, part lament--you name it. Mr. Hirsch does an amazing job of letting the personality and life of his beloved son come through these grief-soaked lines. Hirsch and his wife Janet Landay adopted their son Gabriel when he was an infant and welcomed him into their lives. We got glimpses of his childhood, troubled young adulthood and ultimate early death from an apparent accidental drug overdose: "He was trouble/But he was our trouble." Interspersed among the lines that lets us see who his son was, Mr. Hirsch includes the stories of other poets throughout history who have lost children, surely what is the ultimate horror of every parent, what is completely unnatural: the burial of a child

Much of this poem will break your heart:

In the casket I hope it's comfortable
He would have scorned the old Jew
We hired to sit with him overnight

Janet [you have to love this woman] didn't want him to be by himself
I'm sure he was annoyed by the prayers
I wonder if he believed in God I never asked

He was sometimes scared
He was never scared enough

Of scoundrels and drug dealers

After Gabriel disappeared, his parents tried to find him:

We called 911 every day
The police refused to help us

We begged them to help they refused
Because he wasn't under sixteen or over sixty-five

Mr. Hirsch catalogues the things that Gabriel loved, convincing me that I would like his son: Six Flags, Sea World, retracing Columbus' journey to the New World, Rome, absinthe, his 3000 green Acura Integra, New York City, the Yankees, the Giants, strong coffee, "Dogs were his natural friends," his twenty-second birthday.

The author cannot be comforted:

I did not know the work of mourning
Is like carrying a bag of cement
Up a mountain at night

I did not know the work of mourning
Is a labor in the dark
We carry inside ourselves

Finally Mr. Hirsch has harsh words for an "indifferent God":

Close the prayer book I will not pretend
That God brings peace upon us
And upon all Israel

I will not forgive you
Indifferent God
Until you give me back my son

If there is any consolation to be had from this poem that I have read two times now, it has to be that all of us must confront the deaths--if not of a child--then someone else whom we love dearly.

8 people found this helpful9 people found this helpful

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Samantha

A Poet's Poem

March 9, 2016

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I really don't know much about poetry. I don't know how a poem should be written. Some reviewers have mentioned that this is not true poetry. Well, I don't really care. When I read any book, I want to be taken beyond my regular life, to feel someone else's grief or happiness. This book accomplished that. But I suspect the author/poet wrote this poem more for himself than for us. And for that I thank him.

4 people found this helpful5 people found this helpful

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brutus

shared grief

February 8, 2015

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I feel that if I could write I would have written this poem for my recently passed son with only a few minor changes. The pain is there is most intense between the lines. As with my Robert, Gabriel was born under a bad star and it eventually took him. I also get the feeling of grief that stretches all the way back, knowing in your soul this would never end well. So I may be in a unique position having lived it so I greatly appreciate it.

7 people found this helpful8 people found this helpful

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michael

Great Modern Elegy

December 14, 2014

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A beautiful moving poem, one of the best modern elegies. The form of poem--rough, minimally punctuated--really fits well with the compelling story Hirsch tells about his son, who had neurological and psychological difficulties, dying at a tragically young age. Hirsch is a skilled poet who knows how to use the expressive powers of language and poetry. The vivid and very appealing personality of Gabriel shines through and becomes the great element of the poem. Somehow Hirsch was able to represent his and wife's grief and loss as well as the living presence of the uniquely alive son Gabriel. I think it's Hirsch's best work, and he's done extraordinarily wonderful work already.

3 people found this helpful4 people found this helpful

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