Synopses & Reviews
In
Special Orders, the renowned poet Edward Hirsch brings us a new series of tightly crafted poems, work that demonstrates a thrilling expansion of his tone and subject matter. It is with a mixture of grief and joy that Hirsch examines what he calls “the minor triumphs, the major failures” of his life so far, in lines that reveal a startling frankness in the man composing them, a fearlessness in confronting his own internal divisions: “I lived between my heart and my head, / like a married couple who cant get along,” he writes in “Self-portrait.” These poems constitute a profound, sometimes painful self-examination, by the end of which the poet marvels at the sense of expectancy and transformation he feels. His fifteen-year-old son walking on Broadway is a fledgling about to sail out over the treetops; he has a new love, passionately described in “I Wish I Could Paint You”; he is ready to live, he tells us, “solitary, bittersweet, and utterly free.”
More personal than any of his previous collections, Special Orders is Edward Hirschs most significant book to date.
The highway signs pointed to our happiness;
the greasy spoons and gleaming truck stops
were the stations of our pilgrimage.
Wasnt that us staggering past the riverboats,
eating homemade fudge at the county fair
and devouring each others body?
They come back to me now, delicious love,
the times my sad heart knew a little sweetness.
from “The Sweetness”
From the Hardcover edition.
Synopsis
In these powerful and “achingly beautiful” (Booklist) poems of self-examination and openness from one of the cornerstones of the poetry world, Edward Hirsch assesses “the minor triumphs, the major failures” of his life, and the people and places that have colored it.
About the Author
Edward Hirsch is the author of seven previous collections of poetry. He has received numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and publishes regularly in journals such as American Poetry Review and The New Yorker. A longtime teacher in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, he is now president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.