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...

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...

"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, withou...

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...

Este audiolibro está narrado por una voz digital.Este curso en su formato de libro se trata de la vida misma, y está creado con intención de compartir conocimientos que fui adquiriendo a lo largo de más de una década de preparación en temas de leyes universales, mentalidades, psicología, salud, crecimiento y superación personal.Estas prácticas me llevaron a tener éxito con aquello que deseaba experimentar en mi vida y decidí compartirlas a través de la crea...

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 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...

A major addition to the literature of poetry, Edward Hirsch’s sparkling new work is a compilation of forms, devices, groups, movements, isms, aesthetics, rhetorical terms, and folklore—a book that all readers, writers, teachers, and students of poetry will return to over and over.Hirsch has delved deeply into the poetic traditions of the world, returning with an inclusive, international compendium. Moving gracefully from the bards of ancient Greece to the revolutionaries of Latin A...

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...

Straightforward and precise, these poems, almost exclusively in narrative form, beckon the reader with their immediacy. Gracefully confirming the inextricable links between self and family, Hirsch, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for Wild Gratitude , is, at his best, captivating, transforming tremendous respect for and fascination with his Eastern European roots and Chicago upbringing into enlightened, richly detailed verse that artfully side-steps sentimentality.

Edward Hirsch's strong, arresting poems have been praised from the start of his career. Of his second book, Wild Gratitude, Robert Penn Warren said, "I am convinced that the best poems here are unsurpassed in our time". This, his fourth collection, contains his finest work. From gritty, apocalyptic views of the urban Midwest to brilliantly empathetic portrayals of Simone Weil and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the range of poems is at once wide and subtle. "In the Midwest" speaks of the nightmare ...

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...