Background
Hirsch, Edward Mark was born on January 20, 1950 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Son of Kurt and Irma (Ginsburg) Hirsch.
(In Special Orders, the renowned poet Edward Hirsch brings...)
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”
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(A rich and significant collection of more than one hundre...)
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.
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("Edward Hirsch's gifts include an emotional richness coup...)
"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
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("The Living Fire" brings together a rich selection of the...)
"The Living Fire" brings together a rich selection of the poetry of Edward Hirsch, from seven books of poetry spanning thirty-five years of writing. A poet who is also a passionate advocate of poetry, and a voracious reader, Hirsch infuses his poetry with a powerful blend of formal skill and emotional intensity, exploring his inner life, which is also a reading life, from childhood to middle age. In poems of grace and passion, "The Living Fire" struggles with the unlikely presence of the divine, with the power of art to redeem human transience, the complexity of relationships. In the poem which gives this book its title, Hirsch writes with tender observation of his cat, recalling the eighteenth-century poet Christopher Smart's cat Jeffrey, in an affirmation of the continuing meaning of poetry. 'It is Jeoffrey-and every creature like him - who can teach us how to praise - Wreathing themselves in the living fire.'
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( This collection brims with wide-ranging encounters and ...)
This collection brims with wide-ranging encounters and explorations, fundamental discoveries, and reconsiderations. It is a book of deep, attentive, and appreciative readings. In Responsive Reading, reading itself is treated as a creative act, an intimate, triggering, and momentous activity. The collection begins with a reconsideration of the "J" author, the most ancient and humanly oriented writer in the Hebrew Bible, and concludes with a memoir of the author's grandfather, whose poems (which have not survived) he has tried to envision. There is an investigation of Dante's Inferno and of a biography of Emerson. There are pieces on the Polish poets Zbigniew Herbert, Alexsander Wat, and Wislawa Szymborska, and on the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai; on Derek Walcott; and on the sullen majesty of Philip Larkin. There are also pieces that follow Federico Garcia Lorca and Joseph Cornell (via Charles Simic) on forays into New York City. An award-winning essay, "The Imaginary Irish Peasant," tracks a company of Irish writers into the countryside, both a real and an imagined place, a symbol-laden territory. Indeed, all these pieces testify to a poet's sublime experience of reading. Edward Hirsch is author of On Love, Earthly Measures, The Night Parade, Wild Gratitude, and For the Sleepwalkers. His prizes include an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Lyndhurst Prize, the William Riley Parker Prize from the Modern Language Association, the National Book Critics Award, and the Rome Prize. He is poetry editor for Doubletake magazine and teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Houston.
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(In this unique and lavishly illustrated gift book, famous...)
In this unique and lavishly illustrated gift book, famous writers, including John Updike, Wallace Stevens, Joyce Carol Oates, and Philip Levine, contribute poems and prose--most never before published--on artworks found in one of the country's preeminent museums. 70 illustrations, 63 in color.
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(Edward Hirsch’s sixth collection is a descent into the da...)
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. From the Hardcover edition.
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( A work of art, whether a painting, a dance, a poem, or ...)
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, poet and critic Edward Hirsch explores the concept of duende, that mysterious, highly potent power of creativity that results in a work of art. It has been said that Laurence Olivier had it, and so did Ernest Hemingway, but Maurice Evans and John O'Hara did not. Marlon Brando had it but squandered it. Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith had it, and so did Miles Davis. 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. A masterful tour of the minds and thoughts of writers, poets, painters, and musicians, including Paul Klee Federico García Lorca Robert Johnson Miles Davis Billie Holiday Louis Armstrong T. S. Eliot Ezra Pound Wallace Stevens Charles Baudelaire Herman Melville Nathaniel Hawthorne William Blake Rainer Maria Rilke Arthur Rimbaud Walter Benjamin Mark Rothko Robert Motherwell Anthony Hecht Benny Goodman Ella Fitzgerald William Meredith Sylvia Plath Jackson Pollock
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English language educator poet
Hirsch, Edward Mark was born on January 20, 1950 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Son of Kurt and Irma (Ginsburg) Hirsch.
Bachelor, Grinnell College, 1972; Doctor of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania, 1978.
Assistant professor Wayne State University, Detroit, 1978-1982, associate professor, 1982-1985, University Houston, 1985-1987, professor English, since 1987. President John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, since 2003.
(In this unique and lavishly illustrated gift book, famous...)
(In Special Orders, the renowned poet Edward Hirsch brings...)
("Edward Hirsch's gifts include an emotional richness coup...)
("The Living Fire" brings together a rich selection of the...)
(A rich and significant collection of more than one hundre...)
( This collection brims with wide-ranging encounters and ...)
(Edward Hirsch’s sixth collection is a descent into the da...)
( A work of art, whether a painting, a dance, a poem, or ...)
(A reissuing of For the Sleepwalkers, poems by Edward Hirsch.)
(A reissuing of For the Sleepwalkers, poems by Edward Hirsch.)
(Brand New. In Stock. Will be shipped from US. Excellent C...)
Married Janet Landay, May 29, 1977.