Hirsch, the President of the Guggeheim Foundation, has written ten books of poetry and five books of prose about poetry including the best-selling ‘How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry.’  Born in Chicago and the recipient of a MacArthur award as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award, he has spent most of his writing life as a professor, first at Wayne State and then at the University of Houston.

This volume which I read twice in order to fully appreciate his writing  is a combination of a memoir and a tribute to some of his teachers, friends, and favorite poets.  I strongly identified with the poems which comprise an informal life history that moves backwards in time from the present filled with the deaths of his contempories to his earliest memories of living in Skokie and going to Niles West H.S., my wife’s alma mater.  Along the way, we learn of his jobs as a youth— driving a fork lift in a chemical company warehouse, humping freight cars in a railroad yard, carrying 50 lb bags of ice in a grocery, and riding a garbage truck.  We also learn of his early teaching years in rural PA where he has the epiphany of high school kids relating their joy and writing it down.  Poems about travels to Rome, Algeria, Moscow (where he meets a relative), NYC, and Detroit writing poems, teaching, and living with the ghosts of earlier poets, especially Pound.  There are a few brief poems alluding to his son, Gabriel, a troubled boy who died at 22, the subject of a book length, eponymous poem Hirsch published in 2014.

Bottom line is that I loved this book.  The two main themes here are aging/death and teaching.  Here’s a section of the first poem, entitled “My Friends Don’t Get Buried”:  “I am a delinquent mourner/stepping on pinecones, forgetting to pray./But the mourning goes on anyway/because my friends keep dying/without a schedule,/without even a funeral,/while the silence/drums us from the other side,/the suffocating smell of fowers/fills everything, always,/the darkness grows warmer, then colder,/I just have to lie down on the grass/and press my mouth to the earth/to call them/so they would answer.”  And here’s a section of the poem ‘In the Valley’ about teaching:

 You were a sceptic

            in the Valley of the Lord

            who carried “Pied Beauty in your jacket pocket…

            and learning how to stand

            at a blackboard

            with an open book

            and praise

            the unfathomable

            mystery of being

            to children…

This is one of those unusual poetry volumes which I will return to again.