Wild Gratitude
by Edward Hirsch
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An excerpt from the poem, "Wild Gratitude: " "Tonight when I knelt down next to our cat, Zooey, And put my fingers into her clean cat's mouth, And rubbed her swollen belly that will never know kittens, And watched her wriggle onto her side, pawing the air, And listened to her solemn little squeals of delight, I was thinking about the poet, Christopher Smart, Who wanted to kneel down and pray without ceasing In everyone of the splintered London streets, And was locked away in the madhouse at show more St. Luke's With his sad religious mania, and his wild gratitude, And his grave prayers for the other lunatics, And his great love for his speckled cat, Jeoffry. All day today--August 13, 1983--I remembered how Christopher Smart blessed this same day in August, 1759, For its calm bravery and ordinary good conscience." show lessTags
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What an amazing collection of poems--all very fine, great poems. You have to take your time with these. Hirsch makes you read slowly--very, very slowly--to take it in, to just be in the present moment of Reading This Poem Right Now. Each poem here strives for the eternal--that grasping, yearning towards something in your soul. Each poem here does this for me but my personal favorite is "Poor Angels. "
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Author Information
33+ Works 3,092 Members
Edward Hirsch, a MacArthur Fellow, has published nine previous books of poetry, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems and Gabriel: A Poem, a book-length elegy for his son. He has also published seven books of prose, among them How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, a national best seller, and The Heart of American Poetry. He show more has received numerous prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle Award. A longtime teacher at Wayne State University and in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, Hirsch is now president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in Brooklyn. show less
Awards and Honors
Awards
Series
Belongs to Publisher Series
Knopf Poetry Series (21)
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Wild Gratitude
- Original publication date
- 1986-01-23
- Epigraph
- May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
—W.H. AUDEN - Dedication
- For my parents, Irma and Kurt Hirsch,
and my sisters, Arlene and Nancy Hirsch—
and for Janet Landay - First words
- I NEED HELP
For all the insomniacs in the world
I want to build a new kind of machine
For flying out of the body at night. - Quotations
- But all I could hear was the voicelessness
Of the wind blowing its emptiness across the sad
Rooftops, leafing through the empty pages of trees.
from 'The Secret'
And suddenly I am afraid only that the garden is
Changing even as we are changing, even as the sun
Goes back to being a sun toiling behind purple bars
On the horizon, and our bodies start to wear out
Like our favo... (show all)rite suits and hats.
from 'The Secret' - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Yes, we are still here.
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- Members
- 119
- Popularity
- 274,971
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (3.92)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 5
- ASINs
- 2
