Stranger by Night
Author: Hirsch, Edward
ISBN: 9781524711702
Publisher: RANDOM HOUSE US
Year first published: 16 Mar 2022
Pages: 80
Format: Paperback / softback
Plt;bPgt;Now in his seventies, the award-winning poet looks back on what was and accepts what is, in a deeply moving and beautiful sequence about what sustains himPlt;/bPgt;
Plt;bPgt;Now in his seventies, the award-winning poet looks back on what was and accepts what is, in a deeply moving and beautiful sequence about what sustains himPlt;/bPgt;Plt;brPgt;Plt;brPgt;Beginning with Pquot;My Friends DonP#39;t Get Buried,Pquot; the lament of a delinquent mourner as his friends have begun to die, and ending with the plaintive note to self Pquot;donP#39;t write elegies/anymore,Pquot; Edward Hirsch takes us backward through the decades in these memory poems of startling immediacy.Plt;brPgt; Plt;brPgt;He recalls the black dress a lover wore when he couldnP#39;t yet know the tragedy of her burning spirit; the radiance of an autumn day in Detroit when his students smoked outside, passionately discussing Shelley; the day he got off late from a railyard shift and missed an antiwar demonstration. There are direct and indirect elegies to lost contemporaries like Mark Strand, William Meredith, and, most especially, his longtime compatriot Philip Levine, whom he honors in several poems about daily work in the late mid-century Midwest.Plt;brPgt; Plt;brPgt;As the poet ages and begins to lose his peripheral vision, the world is Pquot;stranger by night,Pquot; but these elegant, heart-stirring poems shed light on a lifetime that inevitably contains both sorrow and joy.
ISBN: 9781524711702
Publisher: RANDOM HOUSE US
Year first published: 16 Mar 2022
Pages: 80
Format: Paperback / softback
Plt;bPgt;Now in his seventies, the award-winning poet looks back on what was and accepts what is, in a deeply moving and beautiful sequence about what sustains himPlt;/bPgt;
Plt;bPgt;Now in his seventies, the award-winning poet looks back on what was and accepts what is, in a deeply moving and beautiful sequence about what sustains himPlt;/bPgt;Plt;brPgt;Plt;brPgt;Beginning with Pquot;My Friends DonP#39;t Get Buried,Pquot; the lament of a delinquent mourner as his friends have begun to die, and ending with the plaintive note to self Pquot;donP#39;t write elegies/anymore,Pquot; Edward Hirsch takes us backward through the decades in these memory poems of startling immediacy.Plt;brPgt; Plt;brPgt;He recalls the black dress a lover wore when he couldnP#39;t yet know the tragedy of her burning spirit; the radiance of an autumn day in Detroit when his students smoked outside, passionately discussing Shelley; the day he got off late from a railyard shift and missed an antiwar demonstration. There are direct and indirect elegies to lost contemporaries like Mark Strand, William Meredith, and, most especially, his longtime compatriot Philip Levine, whom he honors in several poems about daily work in the late mid-century Midwest.Plt;brPgt; Plt;brPgt;As the poet ages and begins to lose his peripheral vision, the world is Pquot;stranger by night,Pquot; but these elegant, heart-stirring poems shed light on a lifetime that inevitably contains both sorrow and joy.
