The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2010

Author: Edward Hirsch
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Category: Poetry By Individual Poets, Literary Studies: Poetry & Poets, Contemporary Fiction, Social & Cultural History
Book Format: Hardcover

A rich and significant collection of more than one hundred poems, drawn from a lifetime of wild gratitude in poetry.

In poems chronicling insomnia (the blue-rimmed edge / of outer dark, those crossroads / where we meet the dead), art and culture (poems on Edward Hopper and Paul Celan, love poems in the voices of Baudelaire and Gertrude Stein, a meditation on two suitcases of children's drawings that came out of the Terezin concentration camp), and his own experience, including the powerful, frank self-examinations in his more recent work, Edward Hirsch displays stunning range and quality. Repeatedly confronting the darkness, his own sense of godlessness (Forgive me, faith, for never having any), he also struggles with the unlikely presence of the divine, the power of art to redeem human transience, and the complexity of relationships. Throughout the collection, his own life trajectory enriches the poems; he is the skinny, long-beaked boy / who perched in the branches of the old branch library, as well as the passionate middle-aged man who tells his lover, I wish I could paint you-- / . . . / I need a brush for your hard angles / and ferocious blues and reds. / . . . / I wish I could paint you / from the waist down.

Grieving for the losses occasioned by our mortality, Hirsch's ultimate impulse as a poet is to praise--to wreathe himself, as he writes, in the living fire that burns with a ferocious intensity.

About Edward Hirsch
Edward Hirsch is the author of seven previous collections of poetry, including Wild Gratitude, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Special Orders. He has also published four prose books, among them How to Read a Poem, a national best seller. He has received numerous awards for his poetry, including a MacArthur Fellowship, and publishes regularly in a wide variety of magazines and journals, including American Poetry Review and The New Yorker. A longtime teacher in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, he is now the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

(BK-9780375415227)

SKU BK-9780375415227
Barcode # 9780375415227
Brand Alfred A. Knopf
Artist / Author Edward Hirsch
Shipping Weight 0.4300kg
Shipping Width 0.160m
Shipping Height 0.020m
Shipping Length 0.220m
Assembled Length 15.900m
Assembled Height 22.000m
Assembled Width 2.400m
Type Hardcover

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