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On Love: Poems
"Life has to have the plenitude of art," Edward Hirsch affirms in his fifth volume of poems, On Love , which further establishes him as a major artist. From its opening epigraph by Thomas Hardy and an initiating prayer for transformation, On Love takes up the subjects of separateness and fusion, autonomy and blur. The initial progression of fifteen shapely and passionate lyrics (including a sonnet about the poet at seven, a villanelle about the loneliness of a pioneer woman on the prairie, and an elegy for Amy Clampitt) opens out into a sequence of meditations about love. These arresting love poems are spoken by a gallery of historical figures from Denis Diderot, Heinrich Heine, Charles Baudelaire, and Ralph Waldo Emerson to Gertrude Stein, Federico Garcia Lorca, Zora Neale Hurston, and Colette. Each anatomizes a different aspect of eros in poems uttered by a chorus of historical authorities that is also a lone lover's yearning voice. Personal, literary, On Love offers the most formally adept and moving poetry by the author Harold Bloom hails as utterly fresh, canonical, and necessary.
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
53 people want to read
About the author
Edward Hirsch
78 books175 followersEdward 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 29, 2022
(Love, for Jews, is nothing if not bookish)
Went out in the ice and cold for a walk. Heartened by the sun, I went to donate books to our wonderful bookshop/cafe. I saw this on the shelf and bought it. The collection is overly penned: written with allusions to notable poets and fenced by a strict form. I value the use of constraints and the nimble savvy such requires. The themes and nods are appealing but I liked the first ones in the collection more than the inventorial ones which conclude the volume. I am moved by blazes of prairie grass but I don't need anyone offering a theme in the key of Wilde or Brecht when I so savor those authors and don't need an imitation as it were.
Went out in the ice and cold for a walk. Heartened by the sun, I went to donate books to our wonderful bookshop/cafe. I saw this on the shelf and bought it. The collection is overly penned: written with allusions to notable poets and fenced by a strict form. I value the use of constraints and the nimble savvy such requires. The themes and nods are appealing but I liked the first ones in the collection more than the inventorial ones which conclude the volume. I am moved by blazes of prairie grass but I don't need anyone offering a theme in the key of Wilde or Brecht when I so savor those authors and don't need an imitation as it were.
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October 31, 2023“when you love a person you always want him to disappear so your mind can work on him”
December 8, 2014
A really interesting collection of poems generally oriented around the theme of love. Hirsch takes the interesting angle of writing historical love poetry, picking famous people - philosophers, novelists, public figures - and writing poems on love from their own perspectives and using their varied philosophies, which makes for some interesting reading.
December 23, 2016
I didn't enjoy this book. I think someone who's privy to poetic criticism might. Many poems felt purposefully inaccessible.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews