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The Living Fire

New and Selected Poems 1975-2010

Edward Hirsch

No Text
Categories: 21st Century, American
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (256 pages)
(Pub. Mar 2010)
9781857549829
Out of Stock
  • Description
  • Excerpt
  • Author
  • Contents
  • It was just an ordinary autumn twilight –
    the kind he had witnessed often before –

    but then the day brightened almost unnaturally
    into a rusting, burnished, purplish red haze
    and everything burst into flame…

    from ‘Man on a Fire Escape’

    The Living Fire brings together a rich selection of the poetry of Edward Hirsch, from seven books of poetry spanning thirty-five years of writing. A poet who is also a passionate advocate of poetry, and avoracious reader, Hirsch infuses his poetry with a powerful blend of formal skill and emotional intensity, exploring his inner life, which is also a reading life, from childhood to middle age. In poems of graceand passion, The Living Fire struggles with the unlikely presence of the divine, with the power of art to redeem human transience, the complexity of relationships. In the poem which gives this book its title, Hirsch writes with tender observation of his cat, recalling the eighteenth-century poet Christopher Smart’s cat Jeffrey, in an affirmation of the continuing meaning of poetry. ‘It is Jeoffrey—and every creature like him—/who can teach us how topraise…Wreathing themselves in the living fire.’

    Cover painting: Charles Demuth, Modern Conveniences, 1921, Oil on canvas. Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio: Gift of Ferdinand Howald. 1931.137. Cover design StephenRaw.com.
    Contents


    New Poems
    The Beginning of Poetry
    On the Anniversary of
    Joseph Brodsky’s Death
    Isis Unveiled
    Winter in Edinburgh
    Dark Tour
    Once, in Helsinki
    The Case Against Poetry
    Early Sunday Morning
    Anything but Standard
    Milk
    Last Saturday
    Forebodings
    What the Last Evening Will Be Like

    From For the Sleepwalkers (1981)
    Song Against Natural Selection
    Dusk
    Insomnia
    How to Get Back to Chester
    For the Sleepwalkers
    Still Life: An Argument
    Song
    A Chinese Vase
    The River Merchant: A Letter Home
    Transfigured Night, Come Down to Me,
    Slowly

    From Wild Gratitude (1986)
    I Need Help
    Fall
    Omen
    Fast Break
    Edward Hopper and the House
    by the Railroad (1925)
    Poor Angels
    Wild Gratitude
    Indian Summer
    The Skokie Theatre
    Commuters
    The Village Idiot
    Three Journeys
    In Spite of Everything, the Stars
    Dawn Walk

    From The Night Parade (1989)
    Memorandums
    My Grandmother’s Bed
    My Grandfather’s Poems
    Incandescence at Dusk
    A Short Lexicon of Torture in the Eighties
    Execution
    In the Underground Garage
    The Abortion (1969)
    Infertility

    From Earthly Measures (1994)
    Uncertainty
    Four A.M.
    Man on a Fire Escape
    Scorched
    In Memoriam Paul Celan
    Simone Weil: The Year of Factory Work
    (1934–1935)
    Away from Dogma
    The Reader
    The Welcoming
    Summer Surprised Us
    Solstice
    Posthumous Orpheus
    Art Pepper
    Mergers and Acquisitions
    Earthly Light

    From On Love (1998)
    The Poet at Seven
    Ocean of Grass
    American Summer
    Hotel Window
    Idea of the Holy
    Two (Scholarly) Love Poems
    From The Lectures on Love
    Denis Diderot
    Giacomo Leopardi
    Heinrich Heine
    Charles Baudelaire
    Margaret Fuller
    Tristan Tzara
    Gertrude Stein
    Marina Tsvetaeva
    Oscar Ginsburg
    Colette

    From Lay Back the Darkness (2003)
    I Am Going to Start Living Like a Mystic
    From The Desire Manuscripts
    The Craving
    What the Goddess Can Do
    The Sentence
    In the Mourning Fields
    The Widening Sky
    My First Theology Lesson
    Lay Back the Darkness
    Yahrzeit Candle
    Dates
    Two Suitcases of Children’s Drawings
    from Terezin, 1942–1944
    From The Hades Sonnets
    The Forgetfulness Chair
    The Asphodel Meadows
    Self- portrait as Eurydice
    Self- portrait as Hades and Persephone

    From Special Orders (2008)
    Special Orders
    Cotton Candy
    Branch Library
    Playing the Odds
    The Chardin Exhibition
    Kraków, Six A.M.
    Elegy for the Jewish Villages
    The Minimalist Museum
    Self-portrait
    A Partial History of My Stupidity
    Late March
    To D.B.
    Boy with a Headset
    Green Figs
    The Sweetness
    A New Theology
    I Wish I Could Paint You
    To the Subway
    Green Couch
    After a Long Insomniac Night
    Acknowledgments



    Edward Hirsch has published seven books of poems: For the Sleepwalkers (1981), Wild Gratitude (1986), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Night Parade (1989), Earthly Measures (1994), On Love (1998), Lay Back the Darkness (2003), and, most recently, Special Orders (2008).  He has also written four prose books, ... read more
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