From the National Book Critics Circle Award–winning poet and critic: "A lovely book, full of joy and wisdom." — The Baltimore SunHow to Read a Poem is an unprecedented exploration of poetry, feeling, and human nature. In language at once acute and emotional, Edward Hirsch describes why poetry matters and how we can open up our imaginations so that its message can make a difference. In a marvelous reading of verse from around the world, including wo...

"A really beautiful book" of poems that delve into—and help us transcend—suffering, loss, fear, and loneliness, by the author of How to Read a Poem ( The Boston Globe).Implicit in poetry is the idea that we are enriched by heartbreaks, by the recognition and understanding of suffering—not just our own suffering but also the pain of others. We are not so much diminished as enlarged by grief, by our refusal to vanish, or to let others vanish, without...

Longlisted for the 2014 National Book AwardNever has there been a book of poems quite like Gabriel, in which a short life, a bewildering death, and the unanswerable sorrow of a father come together in such a sustained elegy. This unabashed sequence speaks directly from Hirsch’s heart to our own, without sentimentality. From its opening lines—“The funeral director opened the coffin / And there he was alone / From the waist up”—Hirsch’s account is poignantly direct and open to the st...

The essential collection by the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winner who was " one of the true master poets of his generation" ( The New York Times).In the words of Galway Kinnell, it is "the poet's job to figure out what's happening within oneself, to figure out the connection between the self and the world, and to get it down in words that have a lasting shape, that have a chance of lasting." With this deeply probing and restles...

From the award-winning poet, dark comic microbursts of prose deliver a whole childhood, at the hands of an aspiring middle-class Jewish family whose hard-boiled American values and wit were the forge of a poet's coming-of-age.“My grandparents taught me to write my sins on paper and cast them into the water. . . . They didn’t expect an entire book,” Hirsch says in the “prologue” to this glorious festival of knife-sharp observations. In microchapters—sometimes only a...

'I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death,' John Keats soberly prophesied in 1818 as he started writing the blankverse epic Hyperion. Today he endures as the archetypal Romantic genius who explored the limits of the imagination and celebrated the pleasures of the senses but suffered a tragic early death. Edmund Wilson counted him as 'one of the half dozen greatest English writers,' and T. S. Eliot has paid tribute to the Shakespearean quality of Keats's greatness....

Fifty-five of Daniel Hughes's final poems, containing distinctly insightful and literate meditations on themes of love, art, and hope.Daniel Hughes's final volume of poetry, written during his years of struggle with multiple sclerosis, displays his characteristic wit, intelligence, and imagination. While the poems in Ashes & Stars deal with themes such as love and mortality, the conflict between imagination and actuality, and the pleasures of the world around us, t...

A Poet’s Glossary was an extraordinary achievement that continues to stand as a definitive source for poets and poetry lovers alike. Here, The Essential Poet’s Glossary gleans the very best from that extraordinary volume."An instant classic that belongs on the bookshelf of every serious poet and literature student."—Washington PostChancellor of the Academy of American Poets Edward Hirsch has compiled poetic terms spanning centurie...

An excerpt from the poem, Wild Gratitude:"Tonight when I knelt down next to our cat, Zooey,And put my fingers into her clean cat's mouth,And rubbed her swollen belly that will never know kittens,And watched her wriggle onto her side, pawing the air,And listened to her solemn little squeals of delight,I was thinking about the poet, Christopher Smart,Who wanted to kneel down and pray without ceasingIn everyone of the splintere...

In his seventieth year, the award-winning poet looks back on what was and accepts what is, in a deeply moving and beautiful sequence about what sustains him.Beginning with "My Friends Don't Get Buried," the lament of a delinquent mourner as his friends have begun to die, and ending with the plaintive note to self "don't write elegies/anymore," Edward Hirsch takes us backward through the decades in these memory poems of startling immediacy. He recalls the black dres...

An acclaimed poet and our greatest champion for poetry offers an inspiring and insightful new reading of the American traditionWe live in unsettled times. What is America and who are we as a people? How do we understand the dreams and betrayals that have shaped the American experience? For poet and critic Edward Hirsch, poetry opens up new ways of answering these questions, of reconnecting with one another and with what’s best in us.In this landmark new boo...

Selected by Peter Davison with an introduction by Edward Hirsch. Sissman was a true phenomenon in American poetry. He published his first book, a collection of antic, autobiographical episodes in blank verse, in 1968. Eight years and three books later, he died of Hodgkin's disease at the age of forty-eight. Of Sissman's remarkable final poems John Updike wrote, "What other poet had ever given such wry and unblinking witness to his own dying? His poetry gave back to life more generously tha...