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Overview
Edward Hirsch began writing a column in the Washington Post Book World called "Poet's Choice" in 2002. This book brings together those enormously popular columns, some of which have been revised and expanded, to present a minicourse in world poetry; Poet's Choice includes the work of more than 130 poets-from Asia and the Middle East to Europe and America, from ancient times to the present-and demonstrates how poetry responds to the challenges of our modern world. Rich, relevant, and inviting, the book reveals how poetry both puts us in touch with ourselves and connects us to each other.
I don't want to go on being a root in the dark,
Insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
Going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,
Taking in and thinking, eating every day.
I don't want so much misery.
I don't want to go on as a root and a tomb,
Alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,
Half frozen, dying of grief.
-from "WALKING AROUND" by PABLO NERUDA,
translated by ROBERT BLY
Synopsis
Edward Hirsch began writing a column in the Washington Post Book World called "Poet's Choice" in 2002. This book brings together those enormously popular columns, some of which have been revised and expanded, to present a minicourse in world poetry; Poet's Choice includes the work of more than 130 poets-from Asia and the Middle East to Europe and America, from ancient times to the present-and demonstrates how poetry responds to the challenges of our modern world. Rich, relevant, and inviting, the book reveals how poetry both puts us in touch with ourselves and connects us to each other.
I don't want to go on being a root in the dark,
Insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
Going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,
Taking in and thinking, eating every day.
I don't want so much misery.
I don't want to go on as a root and a tomb,
Alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,
Half frozen, dying of grief.
-from "WALKING AROUND" by PABLO NERUDA,
translated by ROBERT BLY
Publishers Weekly
Hirsch's follow-up to his bestselling, NBCC award-winning How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry collects two years' worth of his engaging weekly essay-lettres from the Washington Post Book World. Such a collection is inevitably a miscellany as it ranges from biographic sketches and personal portraits to topical subjects, reviews of new books and eulogies for the recently deceased. The 20th-century giants Yeats, Rilke and Neruda, who served as touchstones in How to Read a Poem, appear alongside such contemporary Americans as Robert Bly, Denise Levertov, Gary Snyder and Dorothea Tanning, and newcomers from Europe, Mexico, the Middle East and Asia. Hirsch also casts back to ancient traditions, although there's a gap between these and modern poets that is filled only occasionally by the likes of the rediscovered John Clare and Giuseppe Belli. Taking over the column early in 2002, Hirsch writes, he felt the burden of discussing poetry in the cultural climate of post-9/11 America. Old themes of grief and loss gain new weight as Hirsch discusses Wallace Stevens's and Mark Strand's approaches and Tom Sleigh's oblique refashioning of Greek and Sumerian verse in "New York American Spell, 2001." Eclectic and idiosyncratic, Hirsch's choices are unified by astute excerpting and keen commentary. (Apr.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly
Hirsch's follow-up to his bestselling, NBCC award-winning How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry collects two years' worth of his engaging weekly essay-lettres from the Washington Post Book World. Such a collection is inevitably a miscellany as it ranges from biographic sketches and personal portraits to topical subjects, reviews of new books and eulogies for the recently deceased. The 20th-century giants Yeats, Rilke and Neruda, who served as touchstones in How to Read a Poem, appear alongside such contemporary Americans as Robert Bly, Denise Levertov, Gary Snyder and Dorothea Tanning, and newcomers from Europe, Mexico, the Middle East and Asia. Hirsch also casts back to ancient traditions, although there's a gap between these and modern poets that is filled only occasionally by the likes of the rediscovered John Clare and Giuseppe Belli. Taking over the column early in 2002, Hirsch writes, he felt the burden of discussing poetry in the cultural climate of post-9/11 America. Old themes of grief and loss gain new weight as Hirsch discusses Wallace Stevens's and Mark Strand's approaches and Tom Sleigh's oblique refashioning of Greek and Sumerian verse in "New York American Spell, 2001." Eclectic and idiosyncratic, Hirsch's choices are unified by astute excerpting and keen commentary. (Apr.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.Library Journal
Hirsch, the author of six collections of poetry and three books of prose and winner of several literary awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, comes from a family of Eastern European immigrants. Having grown up surrounded with "the sounds of other people's languages," he instinctively understands the melody, storytelling, and themes in poetry. Originally written as newspaper columns for the Washington Post Book World, the essays collected here (some revised and expanded) exhibit the same knowledge and eclectic taste for poetry that was evident in his best seller, How To Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry. Hirsch includes the work of more than 130 poets from across the globe and across centuries, with poems from the ancients alongside those of the most contemporary of poets creating a pleasurable introduction to poetry. Using an essay form with stanzas embedded, he makes coherent arguments and offers excellent illustrations of how each work and the human experience are intertwined. A mini-course in world poetry, this accessible, learned, and relevant book is highly recommended for all libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 12/05.]-Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.Kirkus Reviews
Brief, illuminating journalistic pieces on poetry written for the Washington Post Book World over the last several years by poet and critic Hirsch (The Demon and the Angel, 2001, etc.). For Hirsch, poetry is a conversation: with other poets, with history, with language, with cultures in restless movement. It puts us in touch with our daily doses of suffering, disaffection and alienation, as he notes in the introduction. Most helpfully, these short essays elucidate the life and work of poets little known, and translated with difficulty: e.g., from the German (Ernst Stadler, Nelly Sachs), Russian (Marina Tsvetaeva, Velimir Khlebnikov), Japanese (Ishikawa Takuboku), Serbian (Radmila Lazic), Slovenian (Edvard Kocbek), Hebrew (Aharon Shabtai, Yehuda Amichai) and Arabic (Palestinian Taha Muhammad Ali). Most comprehensively, they delve into Spanish-language poetry, including work by the author's favorites, Pablo Neruda, Miguel Hernandez and Cesar Vallejo (whose compassionate voice holds particular relevance; Hirsch calls the Peruvian "a prophet pleading for social justice"). The collection sheds light on American poets who deserve more readers, such as the solitary George Oppen, and English poets obscure on these shores, such as John Clare and Charlotte Mew. Each of the essays contains excerpts from the poetry in question, although overall the selections are much too short to be satisfying. Some chapters present a theme, such as "The Poet as Mother" or "Sleep and Poetry" or "Baseball," which all seem hasty and slapdash. Most of the final essays are paeans to contemporaries and friends. Slim and scattered, but tasty, even exotic: a good supplement to Camille Paglia's Break, Blow, Burn (2004),which delves more robustly into English-language poetry, and to Michael Schmidt's scholarly The First Poets (2005), which treats the Greeks.From the Publisher
PRAISE FOR HOW TO READ A POEM"In short, reading Hirsch's How to Read a Poem is like a very long evening with a learned and perceptive friend who keeps leaping to his bookshelf for more and better illustrations, and finding ever more connections and revelations."-NEWSDAY
"A lovely book, full of joy and wisdom."-THE BALTIMORE SUN