Stranger by Night

Poems

Fiction & Literature, Poetry, American
Cover of the book Stranger by Night by Edward Hirsch, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
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Author: Edward Hirsch ISBN: 9780525657798
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group Publication: February 11, 2020
Imprint: Knopf Language: English
Author: Edward Hirsch
ISBN: 9780525657798
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication: February 11, 2020
Imprint: Knopf
Language: English

In his seventieth 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 antiwar 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.

View on Amazon View on AbeBooks View on Kobo View on B.Depository View on eBay View on Walmart

In his seventieth 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 antiwar 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.

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