The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems
A poet’s first selected collection is a landmark, and this incandescent gathering reminds readers of just how accomplished Hirsch was right from the start. In For the Sleepwalkers (1981), he writes, “I’ve come here to stand / like a pilgrim,” thus declaring his sense of awe and hope as he enters the realm of poetry and reaches out to poets who have gone before him. One such poet is Christopher Smart, who inspired the title poem in Wild Gratitude (1986), in which the key phrase, “the living fire,” now this book’s resonant title, resides. For Hirsch, the poet is a night watchman, lifting a torch against the darkness. But both the “ecstasy of fire” and the “fire of grief” blaze and rampage in well-chosen poems from each of Hirsch’s seven previous collections as he revisits scenes from his childhood and a broken marriage, and evokes with radiant insight dawn and dusk, desire and loss, and the endless struggle between body and mind. And Hirsch’s brilliant, deeply pleasurable new poems create an arresting conflagration of scorching sorrow and sweetness, mischievous wit and retribution. --Donna Seaman