num_pages: 88
description: Edward Hirsch’s sixth collection is a descent into the darkness of middle age, narrated with exacting tenderness. He explores the boundaries of human fallibility both in candid personal poems, such as the title piece—a plea for his father, a victim of Alzheimer’s wandering the hallway at night—and in his passionate encounters with classic poetic texts, as when Dante’s Inferno enters his When you read Canto Five aloud last nightin your naked, singsong, fractured Italian,my sweet compulsion, my carnal appetite,I suspected we shall never be forgivenfor devouring each other body and soul . . .From the lighting of a Yahrzeit candle to the drawings by the children of Terezin, Hirsch longs for transcendence in art and in the troubled history of his faith. In “The Hades Sonnets,” the ravishing series that crowns the collection, the poet awakens full of grief in his wife’s arms, but here as throughout, there is a luminous forgiveness in his examination of our sorrows. Taken together, these poems offer a profound engagement with our need to capture what is passing (and past) in the incandescence of language.
language: English
title: Lay Back the Darkness: Poems
titlecomplete: Lay Back the Darkness: Poems
genres: Poetry
ratings_count: 118
publisher: Knopf