The Night Parade

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 3 NOV 2003

Straightforward and precise, these poems, almost exclusively in narrative form, beckon the reader with their immediacy. Gracefully confirming the inextricable links between self and family, Hirsch, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for Wild Gratitude , is, at his best, captivating, transforming tremendous respect for and fascination with his Eastern European roots and Chicago upbringing into enlightened, richly detailed verse that artfully side-steps sentimentality. Less favorable works are static, insulated: like home movies when forced upon a nonrelative, they unfortunately exclude and occasionally bore. When Hirsch ventures outside his own experiences, the most ambitious example of this being ``And Who Will Look Upon Our Testimony,'' a long poem ostensibly about black death in 14th century Europe, he demonstrates his acuity as an observer and poet: `` `In the midst of this pestilence, there came / To an end . . .' / Fortunate are those who come afterward, / The unfallen inheritors of earth / Who turn away from the Dance / Of Death dying in the mind.'' With humility and passion, Hirsch illumes the contradictory resilience and weakness of the human spirit.