Edward Hirsch

Biography

Edward Hirsch is the author of eight books of poems, most recently The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (Knopf, 2010). His previous books include Special Orders(Knopf, 2008) and Poet’s Choice (Harcourt, 2006), a collection of his columns for theWashington Post Book World. He is the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

See Work

ESSAYS / Spring 2014

Fully Loaded: The Poetry of Celia Dropkin

By Edward Hirsch

Celia Dropkin’s poems are erotically frank and emotionally unabashed, deeply engendered, relentlessly truthful. Like songs, they are terse and musical and carefully constructed to explode with maximum impact. They reveal the relationships...

ESSAYS / Spring 2010

Dark Refusals: The Poetry of Tadeusz Rozewicz

By Edward Hirsch

Tadeusz Różewicz is a poet of dark refusals, hard negations. He is a naked or impure poet (“I crystallize impure poetry,” he writes), an anti-poet relentlessly, even ruthlessly determined to tell the truth, however painful it may be. He...

ESSAYS / Summer 2007

Growing into the Psalms: The Poetry of Jirí Orten

By Edward Hirsch
I have been born on this earth for nothing else except to bear witness,
tied down by my weight, my heaviness, and my lightness.

Jiří Orten is one of the key Czech poets of the twentieth century. He belongs with his brilliant predecessors...

ESSAYS / Spring 2005

A Clear Midnight

By Edward Hirsch

Midnight: the witching hour, a haunted time, moment of epiphany. It is at this moment that our swaggering national bard, epic chanter of democracy, becomes a tender and delicate solitary, who addresses something wordless and imperishable...