Special Orders: Poems

by Edward Hirsch

In Special Orders, the renowned poet Edward Hirsch brings us a new series of tightly crafted poems, work that demonstrates a thrilling expansion of his tone and subject matter. It is with a mixture of grief and joy that Hirsch examines what he calls “the minor triumphs, the major failures” of his life so far, in lines that reveal a startling frankness in the man composing them, a fearlessness in confronting his own internal “I lived between my heart and my head, / like a married couple who can’t get along,” he writes in “Self-portrait.” These poems constitute a profound, sometimes painful self-examination, by the end of which the poet marvels at the sense of expectancy and transformation he feels. His fifteen-year-old son walking on Broadway is a fledgling about to sail out over the treetops; he has a new love, passionately described in “I Wish I Could Paint You”; he is ready to live, he tells us, “solitary, bittersweet, and utterly free.”
More personal than any of his previous collections, Special Orders is Edward Hirsch’s most significant book to date.

The highway signs pointed to our happiness;
the greasy spoons and gleaming truck stops
were the stations of our pilgrimage.

Wasn’t that us staggering past the riverboats,
eating homemade fudge at the county fair
and devouring each other’s body?

They come back to me now, delicious love,
the times my sad heart knew a little sweetness.

from “The Sweetness”

Genres: Poetry, American, Art

80 pages, Hardcover

First published March 11, 2008

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

[Dot Penkevich · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ed Hirsch once told me my voice was sexy. Okay, so it was mostly a joke because I was losing my voice while working at a book-signing event for him at a local liberal arts college, but I'll still take it. This collection of poems is more about grief and nostalgia and faith (or lack thereof) than sexiness, but it's beautiful and I'll still take it too.

Not all of these poems gripped me, but when they did, they took my breath away. Hirsch deeply loves poetry (his book How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry is a classic for a reason), and this love is so evident in this collection. It's personal, aching, and self-reflective. Hirsch is someone who can take his grief and confusion and make something of it, which is a rare gift. Here are a couple of my favorites for the road, but this collection is worth reading in its entirety:

A Partial History of My Stupidity

Traffic was heavy coming off the bridge,
and I took the road to the right, the wrong one,
and I got stuck in the car for hours.

Most nights I rushed out into the evening
without paying attention to the trees,
whose names I didn't know,
or the birds, which flew heedlessly on.

I couldn't relinquish my desires
or accept them, and so I strolled along
like a tiger that wanted to spring
but was still afraid of the wildness within.

The iron bars seemed invisible to others,
but I carried a cage around inside me.

I cared too much what other people thought
and made remarks I shouldn't have made.
I was silent when I should have spoken.

Forgive me, philosophers,
I read the Stoics but never understood them.

I felt that I was living the wrong life,
spiritually speaking,
while halfway around the world
thousands of people were being slaughtered,
some of them by my countrymen.

So I walked on—distracted, lost in thought—
and forgot to attend to those who suffered
far away, nearby.

Forgive me, faith, for never having any.

I did not believe in God,
who eluded me.

A New Theology

God couldn't bear their happiness
when He heard them laughing together in the garden.
He caught them kneeling down in the dirt
(or worse) and letting pomegranate juice
run down their faces. He found them
breaking open a fig with fresh delight
as if something crucial had dawned upon them.
I think the whole shebang—the serpent, the apple
with knowledge of good and evil—was a setup
because God couldn't stand being alone
with his own creation, while Adam and Eve celebrated
as a man and a woman together in Paradise,
exactly like us, love, exactly like us.

Special Orders

Give me back my father walking the halls
of Wertheimer Box and Paper Company
with sawdust clinging to his shoes.

Give me back his tape measure and his keys,
his drafting pencil and his order forms;
give me his daydreams on lined paper.

I don't understand this uncontainable grief.
Whatever you had that never fit,
whatever else you needed, believe me,

my father, who wanted your business,
would squat down at your side
and sketch you a container for it.

(Day 2 of reviewing a poet a day)

[jasmine sun · Rating 3 out of 5]

melancholic

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

A friend gave me this slim book of poems for Christmas in 2008. I know because I still have the Amazon packing list, with his holly jolly greeting, in the book.

I read one or two of the poems in the in-between years, but the other night when I picked it up I felt Edward Hirsch was writing for me. Especially this time of year with its magic, beautify and loneliness. And more especially in this particular year. Special Orders is a beautiful collection of poems about growing older, about lost opportunities, about people we can only hold in our hearts, and about the future. It is not a book about death, but about looking back - honestly, madly, wishfully - and looking forward with sadness and wonder. This unique combination makes these poems incredibly moving, and yet oddly comforting. A beautiful gift.

On a side note, I called my friend to thank him (again) for the gift and he said that he couldn't recall Edward Hirsch or why it seemed appropriate to send it in 2008. Heh. Life is funny.

[Jeffrey (Akiva) Savett · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been told that these poems mark a shift in Hirsch's style to a more personal approach. I wouldn't know; but these poems are direct, clean, tightly wrought, and quiet. You won't get much in the way of innovative verbal pyrotechnics or magisterial revelation---but that doesn't mean there isn't so much to value in these poems. Most please me with a surprising choice of verb or noun, which almost always deepen the poem. For example, in "Krakow 6 A.M.", the mornings seems to be unfolding quite sweetly, a calm grey banality to the place. But then Hirsch writes, "the morning is as fresh and clean/as a butcher's apron hanging in a shop." And all of a sudden an eerie memory of fear descends upon the reverie and all of a sudden, I'm thankful to be reading that poem.

[Valerie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read it and I wanted to cry. It made me miss somewhere I've never been.

[Christina M M Rau · Rating 3 out of 5]

Edward Hirsh's collection, Special Orders, mixes memories of his father figures with questions about faith, self, and a romance with urban landscapes. Poem after poem, Hirsch offers simple stories, vivid imagery, and interesting juxtaposition of colloquial and academic language. He references poets and writers, alludes to painters, and has a penchant for green. No, really, the color comes up literally and figuratively throughout. I tore through that book like no one's business, finding it a motivator to write again.

[Yune · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hirsch is one of my favorite poets, and I found some true gems in here (the opening poem stole my breath), but I didn't find myself fully pulled into the common tone of regret or nostalgia. I don't think these are poems that a younger person could have written; there are years hung upon them, although this isn't an ungraceful burden. I may need to re-read these through the next few decades of my life and see how much more I resonate with them.

[Jake · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best ones are at the beginning about his father "who wants your business", and the poeticizing of the dusty warehouse was more genuine and moving to me than most love or nature poetry ever is. Also loved the Chardin and Soutine poems. Both are among my favorite painters. Its only occuring to me now what a great decision it was to choose them for the contrast they make. All in all, a good sad book to start a sad new year. Or not, we'll see.

[Jan Duncan-O'Neal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ed's images, his ability to grab a moment and crystallize its emotion, and his lucid style makes the ordinary, extraordinary. This book is seething with life in all of its dimensions--the joys, the grief, the spiritual and the temporal. I remember meeting this man when he was a student of my husband's at Grinnell College. Even then I knew he would become a fine poet.

[Diane · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first encounter with Hirsch beyond individual poems here and there in magazines, etc. I found poems clear as glass from a poet at home in his own skin and life, able to be simple and direct and poetic all at once. Especially liked Kradow, 6 A.M. and Self-Portrait and A Few Encounters With My Face and To My Shadow. First half better than the second, for me.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Freshly baked bread, wild strawberries, memories on the subway platform, and the texture and taste of cotton candy. This very poignant and nostalgic collection of poetry carries one through Edward Hirsch's personal history with tenderness and affection.

[Tatyana · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I lived between my heart and my head,
like a married couple who can’t get along."
-“Self-portrait“

"Wrinkles form a parenthesis around the eyes
dry wells of sadness at three a.m."
- “A Few Encounters with My Face“

"Wings flutter in my shoulders
and blood courses through my body
like waves cresting on a choppy sea.
Look: the eyes blur with tears
and the tears clear."
-“Happiness Writes White“

"I am a piece of chalk
scrawling words on an empty blackboard.
I am a banner of smoke
that crosses the blue air and doesn’t dissolve."
- “Happiness Writes White“

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fine poems. Fine in the sense that you can tell Hirsch has sharply edited these. Are these great poems? No. They don’t have go to the places or say the things that great poems do - these poems are a little too narrowly minded for that. There are a bunch of poems here that start with references to Hirsch’s father, but generally there’s no real unification in theme or story here so the poems don’t ultimately cohere together as a book.

[Rich Farrell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m a fan of Hirsch and have been reading all of his poetry since I “rediscovered” him this past summer after reading his latest collection, Stranger By Night, which I loved.

This book felt a little more disjointed. There were some great lines and some right poems, but as a whole, this didn’t capture me cover-to-cover like some of his other collections.

[Janée Baugher · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite poem in this collection is "Green Couch" (originally published on Slate). Also, check out his published poem, "To my Shadow" in American Poetry Review. Lots of tercets-students of poetry should check out the triads of lines. I also love his prose.

[Joseph Spuckler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Straight and direct but without much flair or color

[Margaret · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked a couple phrases, and shared a quote with a friend, which automatically puts it into the 5 star category of my rating system.

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. Hirsch's style is direct, unaffected, and unadorned, and some of these poems have a resonance. On the whole though, there is far too little of the startling and/or revelatory for me. I want poetry that shocks me with unimaginable images, poetry that peels back the simple surface to expose the unexpected. This ain't that poetry. That said, we seem to have the same feelings about my hometown.

To Houston

My brash, impolitic, overdeveloped city,
my oil-stained country of three seasons
(you never pretended to have a winter),

my gonzo younger brother who looks stiff
in a white collar (who can blame him?)
and made a fortune selling futures,

my older sister who wears to much makeup
and still looks smart in a pantsuit
(how many times has she been married?)

my mixed neighborhood of Mexican immigrants
and modernist temples (the Menil, the Rothko)
my mystic nights of poetry, oh Houston,

after eighteen years of trying to embrace
your theatrical storms and unforgiving heat,
high ozone, no zoning, strip malls, strip clubs,

I drove away from you on a scorched afternoon
in late summer and haven't looked back since
at your long steaming ribbons of asphalt.

You swell like music in my memory.
I raised a son in you--or tried to--and buried
more than my dead in your baked earth.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Billy Collins echoes, Edward Hirsch's shadowing. Take-out poetry or poetry to-go, anyone? Clear, direct, evenhanded--pretty straightforward, simply unadorned language. Poems possessed if not predisposed to recurring two- and three-line stanzas. In short, couples and companies keep Edward Hirsch's Special Orders in nice and neat lines and clean-cut shapes of thought.

[Harper Curtis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Edward Hirsch at his plain-spoken best, passionate and inspiring. He shares his longings and griefs in these beautiful, sensitive carefully-crafted poems. Here is how contemporary American poetry can be accessible, warm and filled with humanity. A must-read particularly for other poets, who should emulate Hirsch's generous spirit and warm humanity.

[Sur Cur Lengel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fear
sits on your
chest
happily hugging itself
and deeply leering.
Let it--
instead--
become a great stone,
something real:
a heavy
and wondrous
companion.

[RUSA CODES · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was one of the 2009 RUSA Notable Books winners. For the complete list, go to http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/rus...