Earthly Measures: Poems

by Edward Hirsch

Edward Hirsch's strong, arresting poems have been praised from the start of his career. Of his second book, Wild Gratitude, Robert Penn Warren said, "I am convinced that the best poems here are unsurpassed in our time". This, his fourth collection, contains his finest work. From gritty, apocalyptic views of the urban Midwest to brilliantly empathetic portrayals of Simone Weil and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the range of poems is at once wide and subtle. "In the Midwest" speaks of the nightmare of abandon and decay; "From a Train (Hofmannsthal in Greece)" is the poet's compelling view of a timeless landscape; "The Italian Muse" is a meditation on Henry James in Rome; "Luminist Paintings at the National Gallery" beautifully evokes the sense of nineteenth-century American countryside. There is an argument about transcendence in these poems, an evocation of American spaces and European landscapes, a quest for reconciliation to the earth as it is. Hirsch's work, as Anthony Hecht has said, "has not only the courage of its strong emotions, but the language and form that makes and keeps them clear and true".

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Edward Hirsch is a celebrated poet and peerless advocate for poetry. He was born in Chicago in 1950—his accent makes it impossible for him to hide his origins—and educated at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph.D. in Folklore. His devotion to poetry is lifelong.He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal of Honor, the Prix de Rome, and an Academy of Arts and Letters Award. In 2008, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
bio-img
Edward Hirsch’s first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers (1981), received the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. His second collection, Wild Gratitude (1986), won the National Book Critics Award.
Since then, he has published six additional books of poems: The Night Parade (1989), Earthly Measures (1994),On Love (1998), Lay Back the Darkness (2003), Special Orders (2008), and The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of poems.Hirsch is also the author of five prose books, including A Poet’s Glossary (2014), the result of decades of passionate study, Poet’s Choice (2006), which consists of his popular columns from the Washington Post Book World, and How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), a national bestseller. He is the editor of Theodore Roethke’s Selected Poems (2005) and co-editor of The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology (2008). He also edits the series “The Writer’s World” (Trinity University Press).Edward Hirsch taught for six years in the English Department at Wayne State University and seventeen years in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. He is now president of the
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Reviews

[māris šteinbergs · Rating 5 out of 5]

ļoti ļoti baudāms literatūras gabals
amerikāņu dzejai būt!

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book of poems I've ever read. I've only read like 2 other books of poetry, and I don't know anything about poetry, but still it's pretty darn good. For example:

Man on a Fire Escape

He couldn’t remember what propelled him
out of the bedroom window onto the fire escape
of his fifth-floor walkup on the river,

so that he could see, as if for the first time,
sunset settling down on the dazed cityscape
and tugboats pulling barges up the river.

There were barred windows glaring at him
from the other side of the street
while the sun deepened into a smoky flare

that scalded the clouds gold-vermilion.
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:

the factories pouring smoke into the sky,
the trees and scrubs, the shadows
of pedestrians singed and rushing home . . .

There were storefronts going blind and cars
burning on the parkway and steel girders
collapsing into the polluted waves.

Even the latticed fretwork of stairs
where he was standing, even the first stars
climbing out of their sunlit graves

were branded and lifted up, consumed by fire.
It was like watching them start of Armageddon,
like seeing his mother dipped in flame . . .

And them he closed his eyes and it was over.
Just like that. When he opened them again
the world had resembled beyond harm.

So where had he crossed to? Nowhere.
And what had he seen? Nothing. No foghorns
called out to each other, as if in a dream,

and no moon rose over the dark river
like a warning—icy, long-forgotten—
while he turned back into an empty room.

---

And unlike the other two books of poetry I've read, I thoroughly enjoyed every single poem in this book. And I don't even like poetry!

[Keeley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fantastic book of poems. While reading, I wished I had been exposed to these poems when the book was published in 1994; it would have given me a great window into what the English language was capable of in my time. (Not to say that reading Vergil and Allen Ginsburg was a bad way to spend 1994.)
The first third of the collection seems to revolve around religion, with a lot of Catholic figures. The second third (my favorite) is focused on Rome. The final third turns mostly to America. The contrast between the age, numinous qualities and beauty of Rome and the raw, bleak openness of America definitely strikes a chord. Particular favorite poems would be The Welcoming and Art Pepper. Occasionally I am irritated by the line breaks, but in general the poems are readable and powerful.

[Rich Farrell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m a big fan of Hirsch’s work, but some of the poems in this collection were a little too embedded in references to specific works of art or movements that I didn’t go explore so didn’t get the full experience out of them. No Hirsch is bad, but this book didn’t stand out to me.

[Bo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enough great lines and a few amazing poems -- to rate a 5 star from me.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems are easy to read and understand while they provoke deep thinking.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 H6691e 1994