The Night Parade - Hardcover

Hirsch, Edward

3.83

77 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394577205 ISBN 13: 9780394577203

Publisher: Knopf, 1989

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Poems deal with the past, mortality, family life, artists, architecture, myth, torture, illness, and love

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About the Author:

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 best-seller, and The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration (2002). A frequent contributor to the 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. 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.

From Publishers Weekly:

Straightforward and precise, these poems, almost exclusively in narrative form, beckon the reader with their immediacy. Gracefully confirming the inextricable links between self and family, Hirsch, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for Wild Gratitude , is, at his best, captivating, transforming tremendous respect for and fascination with his Eastern European roots and Chicago upbringing into enlightened, richly detailed verse that artfully side-steps sentimentality. Less favorable works are static, insulated: like home movies when forced upon a nonrelative, they unfortunately exclude and occasionally bore. When Hirsch ventures outside his own experiences, the most ambitious example of this being "And Who Will Look Upon Our Testimony," a long poem ostensibly about black death in 14th century Europe, he demonstrates his acuity as an observer and poet: " 'In the midst of this pestilence, there came / To an end . . .' / Fortunate are those who come afterward, / The unfallen inheritors of earth / Who turn away from the Dance / Of Death dying in the mind." With humility and passion, Hirsch illumes the contradictory resilience and weakness of the human spirit.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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