Wild Gratitude
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
An excerpt from the poem, Wild Gratitude:
"Tonight when I knelt down next to our cat, Zooey,
And put my fingers into her clean cat's mouth,
And rubbed her swollen belly that will never know kittens,
And watched her wriggle onto her side, pawing the air,
And listened to her solemn little squeals of delight,
I was thinking about the poet, Christopher Smart,
Who wanted to kneel down and pray without ceasing
In everyone of the splintered London streets,
And was locked away in the madhouse at St. Luke's
With his sad religious mania, and his wild gratitude,
And his grave prayers for the other lunatics,
And his great love for his speckled cat, Jeoffry.
All day today—August 13, 1983—I remembered how
Christopher Smart blessed this same day in August, 1759,
For its calm bravery and ordinary good conscience."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Like a virtuoso pianist who makes a difficult piece sound easy to play, Hirsch writes poems that flow with a captivating directness and ease. Using a simple vocabulary, a sometimes intimate, conversational tone, he creates succinct and powerful pieces in which an honest voice speaks without affectation. It is a voice of affirmation, expressing "wild gratitude'' for life with all its beauty, complexity and terror. Writing of a friend dying of cancer at 37, Hirsch finds an objective correlative in a windy October night, full of falling leaves and rain, which transports the reader from the particular to the universal. In ``Commuters,'' he writes about a man who stands outside himself watching himself get off a commuter train and into his car. Repetition and precise description of the man's movements capture perfectly his sense of dislocation and alienation. This volume of 32 poems, part of the Knopf Poetry Series, is an admirable successor to Hirsch's first, highly praised book, For the Sleepwalkers. January 23
