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Cargando... Stranger by Night: Poems (2020)por Edward Hirsch
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"In his 70th birthday year, the award-winning poet looks back on what was and accepts what is, in a 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," Hirsch takes us backward through the decades in these memory poems of startling immediacy. He recalls the black dress a lover wore when he couldn't yet know the tragedy of her burning spirit; the radiance of an autumn day in Detroit when his students smoked outside, passionately discussing Shelley; the day he got off late from a railyard shift and missed an anti-war demonstration. There are direct and indirect elegies to lost contemporaries like Mark Strand, William Meredith, and, most especially, his longtime compatriot Philip Levine, whom he honors in several poems about daily work in the late midcentury Midwest. As the poet ages and begins to lose his peripheral vision, the world is "stranger by night," but these elegant, heart-stirring poems shed light on a lifetime that inevitably contains both sorrow and its opposite"-- No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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 Google Books — Cargando...GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)811.54Literature English (North America) American poetry 20th Century 1945-1999Clasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio: (4.5)
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The somber tone never really changes but some of the memory poems have a lighter tone - there is some lifting of the clouds. But the sun never really shows up - the overarching images are the ones of cemeteries and funerals, of loss and sorrow.
To all that is added the very personal loss of Hirsh - he started losing his eyesight. A set of poems towards the end of the book deals with that and they are as heart-breaking as anything else in this collection.
For a slim collection, it was a hard work reading it. The poems were sometimes too forceful and the darkness kept coming. Even the lighter ones had enough darkness in them to add to the overall gloominess. The collection makes you think of death and loss - and that is not always a comfortable feeling.
I've read a few of those poems before in various magazines and journals. They are dark but they almost seem to contain a ray of hope on their own. Assembled into a collection, read in the order selected by the author (and the editors), feeding each other, that hope is lost and it is all about the darkness in all its forms. And even the ones that do not work on their own for me add to the overall feeling.
And it is the very last poem that hits the hardest. On its face it is one of the lighter ones. But when a collection full of elegies ends with one called "Don't write elegies", it makes you pause. It is almost a denial of the whole collection. And at the same time it is also a closing chapter - all the elegies are now written, it is someone else's turn to write and mourn, it is time to move on. (