Edward Hirsch

Start: Apr 6 2010 7:00 pm

End: Apr 6 2010 8:30 pm

Another April means another National Poetry Month, and another book from Ed Hirsch means (as long as we're lucky) another delightful evening of poetry here at Brazos. We love welcoming Hirsch back to Houston and celebrating his work, past and present. His rich and significant upcoming collection of more than one hundred new and selected poems chronicle insomnia (“the blue-rimmed edge / of outer dark, those crossroads / where we meet the dead”), art and culture (poems on Edward Hopper and Paul Celan, love poems in the voices of Baudelaire and Gertrude Stein, a meditation on two suitcases of children’s drawings that came out of the Terezin concentration camp), and his own experience, including the powerful, frank self-examinations in his more recent work.

Repeatedly confronting the darkness, his own sense of godlessness (“Forgive me, faith, for never having any”), he also struggles with the unlikely presence of the divine, the power of art to redeem human transience, and the complexity of relationships. Throughout the collection, his own life trajectory enriches the poems; he is the “skinny, long-beaked boy / who perched in the branches of the old branch library,” as well as the passionate middle-aged man who tells his lover, “I wish I could paint you— / . . . / I need a brush for your hard angles / and ferocious blues and reds. / . . . / I wish I could paint you / from the waist down.”

Grieving for the losses occasioned by our mortality, Hirsch’s ultimate impulse as a poet is to praise—to wreathe himself, as he writes, in “the living fire” that burns with a ferocious intensity.

Edward Hirsch is the author of seven previous collections of poetry and four prose books, among them How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, a national best seller. He has received numerous awards for his poetry, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and a MacArthur Fellowship, and publishes regularly in a wide variety of magazines and journals. A longtime teacher, at Wayne State University and in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, Hirsch is now president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in New York City.