About the Author

Edward Hirsch has published five previous books of poems-For the Sleepwalkers(1981),Wild Gratitude(1986), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award,The Night Parade(1989),Earthly Measures(1994), andOn Love(1998). He has also written three prose books, includingHow to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry(1999), a national best-seller, andThe Demon and the Angel- Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration(2002). A frequent contributor to the leading magazines and periodicals, includingThe New Yorker, DoubleTake,andAmerican Poetry Review,he also writes the Poet's Choice column for theWashington Post Book World.He has received the Prix de Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and a MacArthur Fellowship. A professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston for seventeen years, he is now President of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Reviews

"This is a lovely and moving collection, and it has not only the courage of its strong emotions, but the language and form that makes and keeps them clear and true."

Like a virtuoso pianist who makes a difficult piece sound easy to play, Hirsch writes poems that flow with a captivating directness and ease. Using a simple vocabulary, a sometimes intimate, conversational tone, he creates succinct and powerful pieces in which an honest voice speaks without affectation. It is a voice of affirmation, expressing ``wild gratitude'' for life with all its beauty, complexity and terror. Writing of a friend dying of cancer at 37, Hirsch finds an objective correlative in a windy October night, full of falling leaves and rain, which transports the reader from the particular to the universal. In ``Commuters,'' he writes about a man who stands outside himself watching himself get off a commuter train and into his car. Repetition and precise description of the man's movements capture perfectly his sense of dislocation and alienation. This volume of 32 poems, part of the Knopf Poetry Series, is an admirable successor to Hirsch's first, highly praised book, For the Sleepwalkers. January 23

"This is a lovely and moving collection, and it has not only the courage of its strong emotions, but the language and form that makes and keeps them clear and true."