Earthly Measures: Poems

by Edward Hirsch

“These are poems of immense wonder and rigor. To say that they are religious poems is only to recognize their grandeur and generosity, and their heart-breaking longing.”
—Patricia Hampl, The New York Times Book Review
 
“With Earthly Measures, Edward Hirsch breaks through the ring of fire and captures his Muse. The voice is now uncannily his own; uncanny because we believe we have heard it before, yet the accents are unearthly and utterly fresh. Like his poem on Art Pepper, this voice also hears the chords of Stevens and Celan, but knows that ‘play solo means going on alone, improvising.’”
—Harold Bloom
 
“Edward Hirsch is one of the finest poets we have! He has wonderful gifts to offer a strong, touching narrative voice; alert, mindful eye; the moral energy that informs his manner of writing and his choice of subjects; a desire to reach his readers, bring them into the world he observes, creates.”
—Robert Coles
 
“I can’t think of any contemporary whose poems have such an unfeigned urgency of feeling. At the same time, Hirsch’s poems have a considered richness in them, and greatly repay rereading.”
—Richard Wilbur

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

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