Gabriel: A Poem

by Edward Hirsch

Longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award

Never has there been a book of poems quite like Gabriel, in which a short life, a bewildering death, and the unanswerable sorrow of a father come together in such a sustained elegy. This unabashed sequence speaks directly from Hirsch’s heart to our own, without sentimentality. From its opening lines—“The funeral director opened the coffin / And there he was alone / From the waist up”—Hirsch’s account is poignantly direct and open to the strange vicissitudes and tricks of grief. In propulsive three-line stanzas, he tells the story of how a once unstoppable child, who suffered from various developmental disorders, turned into an irreverent young adult, funny, rebellious, impulsive. Hirsch mixes his tale of Gabriel with the stories of other poets through the centuries who have also lost children, and expresses his feelings through theirs. His landmark poem enters the broad stream of human grief and raises in us the strange hope, even consolation, that we find in the writer’s act of witnessing and transformation. It will be read and reread.  

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Death, Memoir, Grief, American, Parenting

78 pages, Paperback

First published September 2, 2014

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

[Debbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Biggest horror ever? A kid’s death, hands down. This elegy for Gabriel, a 22-year-old who died of an accidental overdose, is written by the grieving poet dad, Edward Hirsch. The work is a masterpiece; it was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2014 and I’m not a bit surprised. I am slightly poem-phobic (often I just don’t “get” poems, so I feel dumb), so I just love it when I find a poem that grabs me like this one did.

Here, the grieving poet dad is able to convey his utter despair through art. After Gabriel's death, Hirsch couldn’t work. A couple of years later he wrote the poem because he was afraid of losing memories of his son and was desperate to find some solace. He said, “I found a comfort in trying to solve some poetic problems, because there were human ones I just couldn’t solve.”

Hirsch and his wife adopted Gabriel when he was five days old. Gabriel was a tough kid—he had developmental problems, which affected his behavior and mood. He was loud, anxious, impulsive, and impatient, and he had a hard time in this world. Many stressful times for the parents as they got him help, bailed him out, sat him down, let him fly, tried to make life easier for him. A parent’s love is unconditional and despite the grief he caused them when he was alive, nothing, nothing could compare to the utter devastation they experienced when he died.

Hirsch’s language is beautiful. Through a book-length poem without punctuation, he puts together a collage of memories of Gabriel, plus lays his hugundous load of grief on the page. And with this art we feel his unending pain.

Here’s a sample of how Hirsch talks about Gabriel:

Unbolt the doors
Fling open the gates
Here he comes

Chaotic wind of the gods
He was trouble
But he was our trouble

And here’s a sample of how Hirsch talks about his own grief:

I did not know the work of mourning
Is like carrying a bag of cement
Up a mountain at night

The mountaintop is not in sight
Because there is no mountaintop
Poor Sisyphus grief

(Yes, you might have to be an English major to know the Sisyphus reference, but it’s worth looking that one up if you’re not one. It does add power to this verse.)

I have a good friend who lost a beautiful but troubled son to an overdose. I can barely think of him without crying. My friend will never ever recover. She’s an artist and writer, and she, too, tries to find comfort in speaking through her art. She has said that she would trade anything, anything, to have him back for just one second. It’s gigundously sad stuff like this that puts my problems in perspective.

This poem reminded me of how I felt after reading The Year of Magical Thinking as well as the last letter in Dear Mr. You. I had a startling sense of the person who died and got a close glimpse of what the grief must feel like--though of course I know I can never imagine it completely. This will be a cathartic read for anyone who has lost someone or is close to a friend who did. Highly recommend.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

GABRIEL is a touching and heartbreaking Poem that reads more like a short story about the tumultuous life and devastating loss of a beloved son.

Beautifully written elegy. Unimaginable loss.

[Kevin Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book may well be a five-star masterpiece and I only give it a lesser star because I need to give myself some distance from its raw quality before arriving at a final evaluation for myself, but still wanted to write some first impressions for me to return to.

I read a New Yorker article about Hirsch and his son's death recently and so when this came up as a suggestion for me to read, I casually thought it might be interesting. Edward Hirsch has always struck me as a very competent poet but, to be honest, nothing he has written has really stayed with me in any meaningful way. Until now. I was unprepared for the power of this poem. Of course losing one's child is overwhelmingly sorrowful, and precisely because it is overwhelming I think few poets succeed in writing effective elegies on the death of their children -- it is just one devastating human experience that even poetry seems to fail to provide a meaningful way of shaping the experience. And in many ways, that is precisely what Hirsch's poem is about -- the lack of consolation the poetic elegy itself can provide in the face of this unimaginable loss.

The poem slowly but steadily builds and builds in many ways like Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings (that was the piece that eventually kept going on in my head as I neared the end of this book-length poem). Hirsch starts out very slow and almost in a purposefully sedated voice; but along the way of remembering his son's initial joy entering the family, his life-long struggle with behavioral and learning disabilities, and the eventual details leading up to Gabriel's death and funeral, Hirsch unexpectedly intersperses how other poets and artists have tried to deal with the loss of a child in their art mediums and these become almost connective tissue that give the poem a support structure even as the poet and the reader might find them inadequate. So from Johnson's premonition of losing his oldest son, to Issa writing a devastating but immensely impactful haiku on the loss of his daughter to smallpox after losing three infant sons previously ("The world of dew/Is the world of dew/And yet and yet"), to exploring how Akhmatova's inadequacies as a mother measure up to Hirsch's feelings of sometimes being an inadequate father, the poem succeeds in scouring the various cultural attempts of poetry to provide some form of relief but all in vain. At the heart of the poem, Hirsch quotes Ungaretti after losing his nine-year-old son with this brutal truth:

  It was the most terrible event of my life
I know what death means
I knew it even before

But when the best part of me was ripped away
I experienced death in myself 
From that moment on 

It would strike me as shameless 
To talk about it
That pain will never stop tormenting me

Chronicling that painful and inescapable predicament of unceasing sorrow that no cultural poetic model can fully provide an adequate means of expressing becomes Hirsch's unique American contribution to this very tragic but necessary collection of poetic efforts. I won't comment directly on the final pages because they must be experienced to fully appreciate them, but trust me that they are absolutely unforgettable -- taking a quote from (Agha) Shahid (Ali) (?) on the death of his mother ("I hope there is a God...He owes me an apology") as his cue, Hirsch writes one of the most honest, raw, and beautiful laments I think I have ever read. The poem's rawness may seem very "unpoetic" to some, but I am sure Hirsch couldn't care less at this point; and for us, that "unpoetic" nature may precisely be the ultimate take-away from this amazing poem: for a loss this raw, the fault line between poetry's power to actually express human grief and still its ultimate inadequacy to fully and truly encompass such an overwhelming loss will necessarily be exposed. This is an important poem even as it exposes those fault lines, and I'm enriched for having read it and grateful that Hirsch has written and published it despite his unimaginable pain.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

So sad... The unthinkable.. Losing your child.
This is an elegy for a son.

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am only vaguely familiar with the poetry and poetry-championing of Edward Hirsch. I've read some of his poetry in little magazines and anthologies, none of which I can recall at this moment. But this poem I will remember. It's an elegy, a eulogy, a keening rage of a poem about the death of his 22 year old son Gabriel, told in tercets, ten per page, 78 pages, which I began reading, aware of the subject, and then completed in one sitting. Then I read it again, a bit more slowly.

The tercets seesaw as they go, unbalanced, as is Gabriel, with several disabilities, including Tourette's Syndrome, ADHD, and what all else, also unbalancing most people he encounters. As is Hirsch, unbalanced by Gabriel's life, unbalanced by his loss. Most people failed to reach him, help him and he didn't seem to reach out to people very well, either. He was too complicated, too loud, too annoying, too crazy.

But Hirsch was Gabriel's father and he stuck with him through it all, the flow of consultants, the failed schools, the crash after burn after crash. Hirsch loved his son the way most parents love their kids, for all his faults, and grieves him for what he was and was not in this poem. One of the most powerful dimensions of this text is Hirsch citing other poets and writers who lost their children and revealing how they dealt or failed to deal with those losses. A lover of poetry, Hirsch knows the poetry of death, so he cites it in his own work that joins with the others. He knows what poetry can and cannot do as testimony to pain. His is an inquiry into the poetry of death and at once a kind of celebration of the balm it can offer.

The long, book-length poem hardly feels like a poem at all in its first third; it's prosaic, a memoir, helping us meet and understand his son in all his outrageousness. He's talking with us. And he doesn't try to prettify this boy. No one could deal with him with much success, including Hirsch and Gabriel's mother; no therapist, psychiatrist, teacher, though some had a little success along the way. Almost no one, Hirsch makes clear, could see their way into Gabriel's essential sweetness.

Being with Hirsch at the funeral is like all funerals for children, too raw, a kaddish for something cosmically unacceptable, as it would be for any of us, and Hirsch rails in the accumulating pages against a God he doesn't believe exists. Those children dead in that school at Sandy Hook, or everywhere, every day now? In each household, this rage and despair. Hirsch is a poet and speaks as (once) poet laureate of his and perhaps others's hearts.

This is Hirsch's story, about his son. But if you, like me, had two sons with serious disabilities, one at eighteen with severe autism, the other at fifteen with "psychotic episodes," you would know that a poem like this can only be read through your own life. I fear for their futures. To some extent, I already grieve for what it is they have lost or never had. When I am gone, what will happen to them? Who will care to care for them? Will the street ever be their home, as it very nearly could have been had Hirsch not been there for his kid?

Yet Hirsch also comforts me in what he shares, in certain places. The last third of his poem is rhapsodic, wildly imagistic in the way the first third was not. He shows us the power of poetry, and language, to attempt to reach the meaning of a child's death. To bring Gabriel to life through words! But though poetry may be the closest language to grief, it also falls short, and has its power in part because it falls short, gets at the unspeakable in the world, as Hirsch makes clear. In the end, and forever, Hirsch seems to say, the loss of a child is mainly a howling abyss of loss, and you take what comfort you can, if any, from memory and the power that the memory of love and language can bring. But even that's achingly painful, of course.

[Ron Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a couple of years in the early 2000s, Edward Hirsch wrote a popular column for Book World called “Poet’s Choice.” Every week, with great intelligence and wit, he taught us how to appreciate poems from around the world.

Now Hirsch opens a window on what was going on in his own life during that time. He’s just published a work of poetry called “Gabriel” about the tumultuous experience of his adopted son, his “reckless boy,” who died at the age of 22 in 2011.

I’ve been haunted by this devastating book for months. To borrow a phrase from one of Hirsch’s earlier poems, parts of “Gabriel” read like a “white grief-stricken wail.”

To read the rest, go to The Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/s...

[Nina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunned is the word that leaps to my mind in reaction to reading Gabriel. Hirsch’s book-length poem about his son’s life and death is an elegy, a eulogy, a lament, a rant, but most of all, a love song. Written in tercets, without punctuation, the poem captures the roller coaster of grief, the rushing forward and holding back. At the same time, it is a perfect form for the story of a young man diagnosed with Tourette’s, which is also characterized by bursts and abrupt halts. There are ten tercets to each page; Hirsch’s precise line breaks propel the reader forward, sometimes hurtling, and sometimes a bit more contemplative. He is a master at picking up and slowing down the pace of the poem.

In an interview with Tim Adams, published in The Guardian, Hirsch says “Gabriel was not a shrinking violet, he imposed himself on a room. He wanted people to know him.” This book imposes itself on the reader; unable to put it down, I have returned to passage after passage, finding new nuggets each time.
The book opens with Hirsch at the funeral home.
The funeral director opened the coffin
And there he was alone
From the waist up

Hirsch then goes back in time and shares his son with readers. Gabriel bounces off the pages, careens through life experiences, and settles firmly in the heart of the reader.
Some nights I could not tell
If he was the wrecking ball
Or the building it crashed into

Hirsch shares the humorous as well as the horrifying. He invites the reader into the raw, open wound of his grief.
I did not know the work of mourning
Is like carrying a bag of cement
Up a mountain at night

This is one of the few books I want to gush over. I am actually carrying it in my briefcase, sneaking a few minutes to re-read pages during the day. As a bereaved grandmother, I feel validated and understood; as a poet, I am in awe.

[jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

poignant and punctuationless, edward hirsch's book-length poem, gabriel, contends with the death of his adopted son at 22. a master task it would be for any mortal to make their way through these pages without tears a'welling. hirsch chronicles gabriel's difficult, often tumultuous life with affection, tenderness, and many a fond memory, but as he recounts the horror and dread upon learning of his son's passing, the stanzas approach unbearable sorrow. while perhaps it was necessary for hirsch to contend with his grief via his poetical gifts, it must have been an altogether different act of courage to share it with the world. burying a child is certainly among the most horrific experiences imaginable, yet hirsch ushers the indescribable into words—bearing witness to his own bereavement and struggling to make sense of an unbearable anguish.

i did not know the work of mourning
is like carrying a bag of cement
up a mountain at night

the mountaintop is not in sight
because there is no mountaintop
poor sisyphus grief

i did not know i would struggle
through a ragged underbrush
without an upward path

because there is no path
there is only a blunt rock
with a river to fall into

and time with its medieval chambers
time with its jagged edges
and blunt instruments

i did not know the work of mourning
is a labor in the dark
we carry inside ourselves

though sometimes when i sleep
i am with him again
and then i wake

poor sisyphus grief
i am not ready for your heaviness
cemented to my body

look closely and you will see
almost everyone carrying bags
of cement on their shoulders

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have tried and failed to come up with a way to review this searing book-length poem. Almost two months after reading, some lines from Gabriel have clearly been burned into my brain, and I think about them over and over. I would like to share those here, but I'd rather you discover them for yourself. This is a book you can read in one sitting, but that doesn't mean you'll be finished with it--or that it will be finished with you.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

A father's outpouring of grief in poetical form. Very moving, as one would expect, it paints a not entirely flattering portrait of the lost son but the love is palpable.

[Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wowzers.... The last two pages. Tears at work!

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This poem comes from a very tender place. It really moved me. I'm not a parent, so I can't imagine losing a child. I think when I do decide to have children, if I read this book again it'll hit me in a different place. Hirsch tackles mourning in a very special way. It's a struggle to write about sadness without coming up with clichés, but Hirsch writes of the heaviness of grief so well. Another thing I loved about this poem was the depth with which Hirsch let us understand Gabriel, his son. The anecdotes and small descriptions are key to his storytelling. And the sequence with which the poem unfolds is flawless. Excellent pacing and the metaphors are beautiful. I suppose the only thing that's keeping me from giving it 5 stars is the lack of connect I was able to get from it. Again, though, I think that could just be due to the fact that I'm not a parent, so I'm so far removed from latching onto the feelings involved with losing a child. But Hirsch taps into a very deep place, and I feel grateful that he shared this story with me.

[Markus Molina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't read much poetry, but I have really enjoyed the only two poetry books I've read. Gabriel is the second. Gabriel is brought to life in this book by his father, who is grieving over his death, page by page, one very long poem. It's sad and introspective and beautiful. I'd recommend it to people wanting to get into poetry as it's fairly chronological and easy to follow, but also carries the aspects of what makes poems stick with you.

[MJ Franklin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hit me right in the feelings! A must-read. But please brace yourself because this book is emotionally devastating.

[Ciahnan Darrell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely gutting. An unadulterated and unblinking look at the grief that comes with losing a son.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful. Devastating. It broke my heart. It made me weep.

[Daniel Sevitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heard about this from the Literary Disco podcast, where I am still 3 years behind, and picked it up online. It's a heartbreaking grief memoir in three line stanzas. It is also a commentary on writing about grief and how a life can be appropriated by the writing and what purpose writing about grief serves. Hirsch both memorializes his son and articulates his sadness with crystal clarity. Not sentimental. Not mawkish. This book is both honest and devastating.

[Michael H. Miranda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Decir que este libro indaga en el duelo como pocos es no decir mucho en realidad. Una gran elegía moderna (más de actitud que de forma, desde luego) por el hijo que ha muerto, una búsqueda, un reencuentro y un redescubrimiento de ese hijo, una escritura frente al espejo (cómo enfrentaron otros escritores la muerte de un hijo) y un vértigo que puede resultar desolador para cualquier lector.
Muy apreciable traducción cuyos aciertos superan el uso (comedido, cierto es) de giros al uso del español peninsular contemporáneo, como "pavos" (bucks), "molar", "golfo" y "empollones", que te sonarán como tiros en un concierto.

[Ellison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Father shares the life of his troubled son who has issues and the result in non-rhyming verse. Sad.

[Kimberly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredibly sad, incredibly powerful. The end is an absolute punch in the gut. Edward Hirsch lays his broken heart right out on the page, giving us the story of Gabriel's short and chaotic life and sudden death. He weaves in the stories of other poets who lost children and how it affected their work, sometimes sharing their words in his own work. The whole thing is told in three-line stanzas with no punctuation. The two that hit me the hardest:

Margaretha Susanna von Kuntsch/Lost eight sons and five daughters/I do not understand how she could stand

and

I will not forgive you/Indifferent God/Until you give me back my son

This poem is a lot. If you have lost a child, I don't know if it would bring you comfort or reopen your healing wounds. As a mother, I really struggled with some of the imagery--but I am glad that Mr. Hirsch wrote this beautiful love letter to his wild, tempestuous boy. I'll carry a little piece of it with me always.

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mournful, expansive, searching—Hirsch's elegy, a book-length poem, for his adopted son who died at 22 from a drug overdose. This poem reminds me of some of the great European symphonies—movements which are, in turn, devastating and uplifting. Grief logic is present in some parts of the poem more than others. Alternatively there is lucidity, opalescence, the slate gray of clouds pregnant with sorrow. There is dreamscape, anecdote, raw vulnerability. One of the best books I've ever read. I was moved by how much HIrsch bared his own shortcomings along the journey—the inevitable questions of an agnostic whose son dies. "What could I have done differently?" And yet it seems, as so many parents do, he gave his absolute best effort.

[Rich Farrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an absolutely heartbreaking elegy. I’ve had on my shelf for months, but Hirsch is one of my favorite poets, and I wanted to have the time and space to read this in one good sitting. In parts, this feels conversational and in others it feels like the highest form of linguistic art all in a good way. He creates his son, with all of his shimmers and scuffs, and then creates the emotion of loss in such a skillful, impactful way. His references to other poets’ losses was incredibly effective in creating this linear sense of loss. It’s beautiful and devastating all at once: a perfect poem out of a horrible experience.

[Jessica Dai · Rating 5 out of 5]

first book of this form (very long poem) I've read, not counting beowulf. I get distracted in long poems easily but not in this one.

I'm so sad the kindle highlights didn't preserve the line breaks automatically

The sun is tired / And so I’m hoisting him up / And carrying him on my shoulders
In the rain it was raining steadily
I don’t want to tuck my son into the ground / As if we were putting him to bed / For the last time

[Jeff Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gabriel is a hundred page poem by Edward Hirsch about the death of his twenty-two year old adopted son by accidental overdose. Hirsch feared he was losing memories of his son, so he wrote this poem to remember him and to process his grief.

I read this while dealing with my own grief. The poem is devastating. Despite that, I found catharsis in it and it made me want to go hug my beautiful daughter.

[Liliana Valenzuela · Rating 5 out of 5]

An achingly honest, brutal, gorgeous long poem about the unthinkable--losing your only child. Devastating, so many great lines, so much life in these beautifully crafted couplets.

[Natalie Landau · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like a huge breath in that you can’t let go of ugh this poem hurt but it’s really beautiful also

[Justyna Makarewicz · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Dd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heart wrenching. A good cry guaranteed.
The author’s reference to sisyphus is incredibly powerful and poignant.

[kylee walt · Rating 4 out of 5]

heartbreaking.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite poets! This is the heart-wrenching poem and any parent (or any human) will identify with Hirsch's poignant book. He is a master with words and the personal nature of this poem takes the reader right into his agony but also allows beautifully expresses the universal of us all.