It was just an ordinary autumn twilight –
the kind he had witnessed often before –

but then the day brightened almost unnaturally
into a rusting, burnished, purplish red haze
and everything burst into flame…

from ‘Man on a Fire Escape’

The Living Fire brings together a rich selection of the poetry of Edward Hirsch, from seven books of poetry spanning thirty-five years of writing. A poet who is also a passionate advocate of poetry, and avoracious reader, Hirsch infuses his poetry with a powerful blend of formal skill and emotional intensity, exploring his inner life, which is also a reading life, from childhood to middle age. In poems of graceand passion, The Living Fire struggles with the unlikely presence of the divine, with the power of art to redeem human transience, the complexity of relationships. In the poem which gives this book its title, Hirsch writes with tender observation of his cat, recalling the eighteenth-century poet Christopher Smart’s cat Jeffrey, in an affirmation of the continuing meaning of poetry. ‘It is Jeoffrey—and every creature like him—/who can teach us how topraise…Wreathing themselves in the living fire.’

Cover painting: Charles Demuth, Modern Conveniences, 1921, Oil on canvas. Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio: Gift of Ferdinand Howald. 1931.137. Cover design StephenRaw.com.

Contents


New Poems
The Beginning of Poetry
On the Anniversary of
Joseph Brodsky’s Death
Isis Unveiled
Winter in Edinburgh
Dark Tour
Once, in Helsinki
The Case Against Poetry
Early Sunday Morning
Anything but Standard
Milk
Last Saturday
Forebodings
What the Last Evening Will Be Like

From For the Sleepwalkers (1981)
Song Against Natural Selection
Dusk
Insomnia
How to Get Back to Chester
For the Sleepwalkers
Still Life: An Argument
Song
A Chinese Vase
The River Merchant: A Letter Home
Transfigured Night, Come Down to Me,
Slowly

From Wild Gratitude (1986)
I Need Help
Fall
Omen
Fast Break
Edward Hopper and the House
by the Railroad (1925)
Poor Angels
Wild Gratitude
Indian Summer
The Skokie Theatre
Commuters
The Village Idiot
Three Journeys
In Spite of Everything, the Stars
Dawn Walk

From The Night Parade (1989)
Memorandums
My Grandmother’s Bed
My Grandfather’s Poems
Incandescence at Dusk
A Short Lexicon of Torture in the Eighties
Execution
In the Underground Garage
The Abortion (1969)
Infertility

From Earthly Measures (1994)
Uncertainty
Four A.M.
Man on a Fire Escape
Scorched
In Memoriam Paul Celan
Simone Weil: The Year of Factory Work
(1934–1935)
Away from Dogma
The Reader
The Welcoming
Summer Surprised Us
Solstice
Posthumous Orpheus
Art Pepper
Mergers and Acquisitions
Earthly Light

From On Love (1998)
The Poet at Seven
Ocean of Grass
American Summer
Hotel Window
Idea of the Holy
Two (Scholarly) Love Poems
From The Lectures on Love
Denis Diderot
Giacomo Leopardi
Heinrich Heine
Charles Baudelaire
Margaret Fuller
Tristan Tzara
Gertrude Stein
Marina Tsvetaeva
Oscar Ginsburg
Colette

From Lay Back the Darkness (2003)
I Am Going to Start Living Like a Mystic
From The Desire Manuscripts
The Craving
What the Goddess Can Do
The Sentence
In the Mourning Fields
The Widening Sky
My First Theology Lesson
Lay Back the Darkness
Yahrzeit Candle
Dates
Two Suitcases of Children’s Drawings
from Terezin, 1942–1944
From The Hades Sonnets
The Forgetfulness Chair
The Asphodel Meadows
Self- portrait as Eurydice
Self- portrait as Hades and Persephone

From Special Orders (2008)
Special Orders
Cotton Candy
Branch Library
Playing the Odds
The Chardin Exhibition
Kraków, Six A.M.
Elegy for the Jewish Villages
The Minimalist Museum
Self-portrait
A Partial History of My Stupidity
Late March
To D.B.
Boy with a Headset
Green Figs
The Sweetness
A New Theology
I Wish I Could Paint You
To the Subway
Green Couch
After a Long Insomniac Night
Acknowledgments