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11-11-2014
Edward Hirsch
Gabriel: A Poem (excerpt)
The funeral director opened the coffin
And there he was alone
From the waist up
I peered down into his face
And for a moment I was taken aback
Because it was not Gabriel
It was just some poor kid
Whose face looked like a room
That had been vacated
But then I looked more intently
At his heavy eyelids
And fine features
He had always been a restive sleeper
Now he was weirdly still
My reckless boy
Dressed up for a special occasion
He liked that navy-blue suit
And preened over himself in the mirror
Hey college boy the guy called out
On the street in Northampton
You look sharp in those new duds
He loved the way he looked
After he stopped taking the meds
That fogged his mind
He admired himself
In store windows and revolving doors
Where his reflection turned
Now he looked rigid and buttoned up
Like he was going to a funeral
On a Friday in early September
…
A teenage boy finds himself
Lying facedown on top of a bus
Racing through a tunnel out of the city
He is plastered to the slippery roof
And breathing in the terrible fumes
Which go on for miles and miles
A boy clinging to the surface
His mouth full of dust
His arms and legs spread-eagled
A winged angel in the grime
Remembers the ocean wind
This spray in his face the fog lifting
The bus slows in heavy traffic
And the boy peers down to see
Himself in the front seat
Of a passing car a stick figure
Crayoned between his parents
And then the bus picks up speed
And flies into the faceless darkness
And the boy and his parents
Become a vanishing scrawl
Lying face down on top of a bus
Racing through a tunnel out of the city
A teenage boy finds himself
Plastered to the slippery roof
And breathing in the exhaust
The darkness visible at last
And then suddenly a blackbird
Floating like charred paper
The bruised blue sky [...]
-from Gabriel
BIO: Edward Hirsch was born in Chicago on January 20, 1950, and educated both at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a PhD in folklore.
His first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers (Alfred A. Knopf), was published in 1981 and went on to receive the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University. His second collection, Wild Gratitude (Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), received the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Since then, he has published several books of poems, most recently Gabriel (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011); Special Orders (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008); Lay Back the Darkness (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003); On Love (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998); Earthly Measures (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994); and The Night Parade (Alfred A. Knopf, 1989).
He is also the author of A Poet’s Glossary (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014); The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration (Harcourt, 2002); Responsive Reading (University of Michigan Press, 1999); and the national bestseller How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (Harcourt, 1999), which the poet Garrett Hongo called “the product of a lifetime of passionate reflection” and “a wonderful book for laureate and layman both.” Hirsch is also the author of Poet’s Choice (Harcourt, 2007), which collects two years’ worth of his weekly essay-letters running in The Washington Post‘s Book World.
About Hirsch’s poetry, the poet Dana Goodyear wrote for the Los Angeles Times Book Review, “It takes a brave poet to follow Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton into the abyss . . . Hirsch’s poems [are] compassionate, reverential, sometimes relievingly ruthless.”
Hirsch’s honors include an Academy of Arts and Letters Award, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
He has been a professor of English at Wayne State University and the University of Houston. Hirsch is currently the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
In 2008, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He lives in New York City.
