Hodgepodge 73/365 - Book Report (Wild Gratitude)

Edward Hirsch, Wild Gratitude: Poems (1986) (1/10/17)

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986, this book of thirty-two poems divided into four parts is both celebratory—as in the title poem—and sorrowful. The tendency is more toward sorrow, or at least melancholy. Even in sweet, quiet observations, there is a bittersweet quality of having lost something, or perhaps never actually having found it.

The subject matter ranges all over the place, from a high school basketball game to a Gypsy's dancing bear, from Christopher Smart's cat Jeoffrey to the claustrophobia of commuting, from an Edward Hopper mansion to a white blackbird (in honor of Sartre), from a Polish home for the aged to a dawn walk. Insomnia figures in many of the poems, and mortality. Also art (an ancient Chinese painting of an emaciated horse) and literature (the poets Paul Celan and Attila Jószef), history (the siege of Leningrad) and childhood memories (being twelve with a girl at the movies in Skokie, Illinois).

As one Goodreads reviewer remarks, "Hirsch, the poet, is a like a man who has flown out of himself." He watches from a streetcorner, delving into the hearts of strangers; he celebrates the sky, the stars, the shifting colors in a puddle or in a city landscape; he ponders his own regrets and dreams—but for all of us.

The last lines of the last poem, "A Dawn Walk," point up "The simple astonishing news / That we are here / Yes, we are still here." Maybe that's what the book is "about": our existence in all its glory, and all its confusing heartache.

Here's one poem in its entirety.

Recovery

It was as if the rain could feel itself
falling through the air today, as if the air
could actually feel its own dampness, the breeze
could hear a familiar voice explaining the emptiness
to the dark elms that swayed unconsciously along
the wet road, the elms that could still feel
their own branches glistening with rain

It was as if the sky had imagined a morning
of indigos and pinks, mauves and reddish-browns.
The smiling young nurse who helped you into the car
was wearing two colorful ribbons in her auburn hair and
somehow they looked precisely like ribbons gleaming
in the hair of a woman helping you into a car.
I believe I had never seen ribbons before.

And suddenly I was staring at asphalt
puddled with rainwater. And bluish letters
purpling on a white sign. And sliding electric
ENTRANCES & EXITS. And statues bristling with color.
The yellow sunlight filtered through the clouds
and I believe I had never seen a street lamp
shimmer across a wavy puddle before.

The road home was slick with lights
and everything seemed to be crying, just
this, just this, nothing more, nothing else!—
as if the morning were somehow conscious of itself.
When you leaned over and touched me on the arm
it was as if my arm needed to be touched
in that way, at exactly that time.