The Night Parade: Poems

(Paperback)

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Poems These strong and well-crafted poems quicken with a sense of life, capturing the human spirit in its nighttime incandescence. As all his work has shown, Hirsch is a poet of many facets and great sophistication, and here he draws from his Eastern European roots and Chicago upbringing to invite us into his world. He writes in homage to all those "conscripted into the brotherhood / of loss," including an elegy to victims of torture in Latin America and an apocalyptic evocation of the devastating European plague of the fourteenth century. But always Hirsch returns to the emotional substrate of his family, from his sister's Little League tryouts to his grandmother's creaky Murphy bed ("It was like putting the night away / When we closed the wooden doors again"). With its dusk meditations on family, art, and history, this is a book about posterity, about what gets passed on and what gets lost in time. For years I fell asleep to the rhythm Of my grandfather's voice rising and falling, Filling my head with his lost, unhappy poems- Those faint wingbeats, that hushed singing.

Author Bio

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), andOn Love(1998). He has also written three prose books, includingHow to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry(1999), a national best-seller, andThe Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration(2002). A frequent contributor to the leading magazines and periodicals, includingThe New Yorker, DoubleTake,andAmerican Poetry Review,he also writes the Poet's Choice column for theWashington 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. A professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston for seventeen years, he is now President of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.