Edward Hirsch

An anthology of poetry offers a study of human fallibility, love, and the fleeting nature of life.

Poems

Lay Back the Darkness

Daryl Houston

I haven't read poetry with any regularity for more than 20 years, when I read a lot of it. I picked up a few slim contemporary volumes from my branch library's paltry collection this week, focusing on names I knew and poets I had neglected. Hirsch's book was the first of these I read (other than dipping into a bit of Yeats -- not a contemporary, so he doesn't really count). I expected to read a few pages, find it tiresome, and put it aside confirmed in my usual feeling about poetry in recent years that it's not really worth the time (my general attitude toward most of the poetry I have peeked at over the last 20 years). 

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.

Lay Back the Darkness Poems

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