Product Description

Judged the author's best work yet by his contemporaries, a collection of poems highlights a human being's struggle with the urgency of everyday emotions. Reprint.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1501087 in Books
• Published on: 1996-02-27
• Released on: 1996-02-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

Amazon.com Review
The absence of God and the abundant presence of human desire permeate Edward Hirsch's fourth collection of poetry and form a passionately important inquiry into the nature of worship and manifestations of the divine. His experience of place is both sensual and archaeological--as he soaks up the colors of the sky and draws upon the earth for inspiration, he also derives strength from "(feeling) the centuries welling up beneath him." As he considers the relationship between instances of spiritual revelation and the everyday realities of irony and brutality, Hirsch concludes that it is the earth that needs our full attention and prayers, "because/ it is only earth--limited, sensuous/ earth that is so fleeting, so real."

From Publishers Weekly
The measures of Hirsch's ( The Night Parade ) fourth book of poetry are anything but earthly. These poems court the extremes of experience from transcendence to acedia: the moment of death, spiritual crisis, intense nostalgia. The lofty reach of the poems derives in part from the poet's chosen subjects; many of them portray, in verse narrative, episodes from the lives of Simone Weil, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Leopardi and Henry James. He generally brings great insight and sympathy to the writers and thinkers he imagines. However, one can find "something strained / and oracular in these incandescent vistas / and glowing atmospherics." At times, the tone plunges from high drama to melodrama, or to farce, as in his villanelle, "The Romance of American Communism." Elsewhere, Hirsch renders intimate moments with affecting emotional precision: "As we stood by the window in a waning light / Or touched and moved away from each other / And turned back to our books. But it remained / Even so, like the thought of a coal fading / On the upper left-hand side of our chests, / A destination that we bore within ourselves." The poet rarely stays at home. His poems inhabit a distinctly poetic landscape of old European churches, burnt-out midwestern cities and slumberous suburban tracts. Though, like an expressionist painter, Hirsch has a weakness for the rarefied and poetic moment, we should be grateful for his often profound identification with human dilemmas.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
These intimate and sensuous poems move from a rejection of the city, with its "skulls of buildings," "discarded carcasses of Fords and Chevys," and smog like "crumbled bits of charcoal/ in the air," to a profoundly spiritual quest for the absolute. There is a deep hunger for divinity here, for a god the poet "had wanted/ so long and so much to believe in." The best poems in this magnificent collection pay homage to those writers and artists who have come closest to the divine: Paul Celan, Simone Weil, St. Francis, Caravaggio, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Henry James, and Wallace Stevens. Hirsch admires these artists because they all appreciated the "bountiful emptiness of everything," a bounty the poet finds in the birth of his son, the jazz solos of Art Pepper, Dutch still-life paintings, and memories of the first snowfall, epiphanies when he truly lived "in the fullness of the moment"--as will the reader of Earthly Measures . Highly recommended.
- Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, Ill.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Time to Read Hirsch Again
Few contemporary poets have been able to eloquently address the wasting of the earth or the commitment to universals as well as Edward Hirsch. His subject matter ranges vastly from the vantage of the American Midwest to the Arcadian visions of the European landscape. His poems are easily read but are slow to absorb and keep in the brain. But with the current global negligence of respect for the planet, reading Edward Hirsch brings back the sanctity of being.

Yes, in this collection of his works he addresses the nightmare of abandonment and decay, continuing themes that have accompanied his poems since he first began writing. But somehow his poems in reference to Henry James, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the school of Luminist artists, the character of Orpheus, etc bring us into his realm of knowledge, a journey that only serves to nudge us back to literature and art and things that live and sustain.
Edward Hirsch is a brilliant poet, one whose name belongs in the highest echelon of American poets. For those unfamiliar with his work this small but exceedingly powerful volume of thirty-seven poems is as fine an introduction as any. Recommended. Grady Harp, February 06