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Loading... Lay Back the Darkness: Poemsby Edward Hirsch
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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. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)811.54Literature English (North America) American poetry 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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But this book was enthralling. Rhythmic and lyrical and flirting with form (e.g. he writes a few slant terza rima sonnets, which really are a lovely form), but disposing of it readily as well. He's writing here chiefly about memory -- the loss of it via his father's Alzheimer's, the recording of it in art (especially art pertaining to or interpreted through the lens of the Holocaust), and by recalling and riffing on well known stories from the likes of Homer and Dante.
I didn't love every poem, but more of them were hits than misses, which was hardly what I expected, makes me look forward to dipping into the other books I picked up, and makes me think about whether I ought to reconsider what a curmudgeon I've been about poetry for the last couple of decades. ( )