Gabriel
A Poem
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
MacArthur fellow and Guggenheim Foundation president Hirsch (The Living Fire) writes the kind of poem that no poet should ever have to: a near-unforgettable book-length verse memoir describing the life and death, the rambunctious childhood, the adventurous youth, the funeral, and the enduring memory, of the poet's only son. As a baby, Gabriel "was a trumpet of laughter/ And tears who did not sleep/ Through the night even once." As a child, he had behavioral disorders that made him hard to handle: "He was trouble/ But he was our trouble." Gabriel found some happiness and some equally wild friends as a young man in New York, but ventured out "during a rainstorm" (apparently Hurricane Irene) "And never came home." Hirsch mixes in his own reflections on other writers' mourning for the children they outlived (Words worth, Mallarme, Mahler) without robbing his memoir of its momentum, nor his outcry at the cosmic injustice when a parent outlives a child. After all the set pieces (the coroner's report, the rituals of Jewish mourning), Gabriel's tumultuously charming personality comes through: "He loved twisting rides on roller coasters/ Coins fell from his pockets/ When he was upside-down." Unpunctuated, unrhymed triplets serve Hirsch's grief and tell his story well: even readers left unmoved by Hirsch's earlier offerings may have to reckon with this one.
