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  • Published: 16 March 2022
  • ISBN: 9781524711702
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 80
  • RRP: $49.99
Categories:

Stranger by Night

Poems





Now in his seventies, the award-winning poet looks back on what was and accepts what is, in a deeply moving and beautiful sequence about what sustains him

Now in his seventies, the award-winning poet looks back on what was and accepts what is, in a deeply moving and 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," Edward 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 mid-century 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 joy.

  • Published: 16 March 2022
  • ISBN: 9781524711702
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 80
  • RRP: $49.99
Categories:

About the author

Edward Hirsch

Edward Hirsch has published five previous books of poems:
FOR THE SLEEPWALKERS (1981), WILD GRATITUDE
(1986), which won the National Book
Critics Circle Award, THE NIGHT PARADE (1989),
EARTHLY MEASURES (1994), and ON LOVE (1998).
He has also written three prose books, including HOW TO
READ A POEM AND FALL IN LOVE WITH POETRY
(1999), a national bestseller, and THE DEMON AND THE
ANGEL: SEARCHING FOR THE SOURCE OF
ARTISTIC INSPIRATION (2002). A frequent contributor
to leading magazines and periodicals, including THE NEW
YORKER, DOUBLETAKE, and AMERICAN POETRY
REVIEW, he also writes the Poet's Choice column for the
WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD. He has received
the Prix de Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American
Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and a
MacArthur Fellowship. He teaches at the University of
Houston.

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Praise for Stranger by Night

“Bring[s] new life to the elegy . . . Consummate, passionate, generous, and resplendent, Hirsch’s poems vanquish the static of our lives and guide us back to a place of contemplation and gratitude.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
“Tender and unflinching . . . Hirsch balances heartfelt elegy with a celebration of the everyday . . . While later poems address Hirsch’s loss of eyesight, giving resonance to the collection’s title, readers will be grateful that the poet’s inner eye remains as observant and compassionate as ever.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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