On a stormy night in 2011, poet Edward Hirsch lost his 22-year-old son, Gabriel. After taking a club drug, Gabriel had a seizure and died of cardiac arrest. In life, Gabriel was exciting and energetic, but he also struggled, as his father remembers in his poetry: I look back at the worried parents Wandering through
Over the course of eight collections of poetry, four books of criticism, and the long-running “Poet’s Choice” column in the Washington Post, Edward Hirsch has cemented his reputation as an attentive reader and an elegant poet, capturing what the Romantic poets called “the true voice of feeling.” His many honors include the National Book Critics Circle
Edward Hirsch reading “Fast Break,” as part of Poet-to-Poet, the Academy of American Poets’ educational project for National Poetry Month 2014. Pellentesque a massa nec massa laoreet iaculis. Nam fermentum porta velit. Aenean mattis bibendum dictum. Nulla convallis egestas risus. Curabitur a nisi in urna rutrum euismod at eget arcu. Nam turpis justo, luctus
Longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award Never 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.
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
Edward Hirsch was born in Chicago in 1950 and educated both at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph.D. in folklore. His first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers, was published in 1981 and went on to receive the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets and
Edward Hirsch discusses the life and work of Joseph Brodsky at the Bravery in Poetry event at PEN's 2013 World Voices Festival
Edward Hirsch is an American poet and critic who captivated audiences with the acclaimed 'bestseller' How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry, in which he brought the pleasure of poetry to readers. Author of eight compilations of poems and six books on poetry, Hirsch is currently the president of the John Simon
Judith Harris: I assume that in the years between high school, when you first started writing poetry, and the publication of your first book, when you were thirty-one, your work was changing as you developed your craft. What were the earliest poems that appear in For the Sleepwalkers, and at what point did you write them?
Interview and short film about poet Edward Hirsch.