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by Edward Hirsch
An acclaimed poet and our greatest champion for poetry offers an inspiring and insightful new reading of the American tradition.
We live in unsettled times. What is America and who are we as a people? How do we understand the dreams and betrayals that have shaped the American experience? For poet and critic Edward Hirsch, poetry opens up new ways of answering these questions, of reconnecting with one another and with what's best in us.
In this landmark new book from Library of America, Hirsch offers deeply personal readings of forty essential American poems we thought we knew—from Anne Bradstreet's "The Author to Her Book" and Phillis Wheatley's "To S.M. a Young African Painter, on seeing his Works" to Garrett Hongo's "Ancestral Graves, Kahuku" and Joy Harjo's "Rabbit Is Up to Tricks"—exploring how these poems have sustained his own life and how they might uplift our diverse but divided nation.
"This is a personal book about American poetry," writes Hirsch, "but I hope it is more than a personal selection. I have chosen forty poems from our extensive archive and songbook that have been meaningful to me,
part of my affective life, my critical consideration, but I have also tried to be cognizant of the changing playbook in American poetry, which is not fixed but fluctuating, ever in flow, to pay attention to the wider consideration, the appreciable reach of our literature. This is a book of encounters and realizations."
"Hirsch's substantial volume honors the whole range of American verse, ... [it] deserves, and rewards, close, patient attention... . A book of revelations." —The Washington Post
"This labor of love from one of America's greatest champions of poetry stands out from critically distant collections as a personal and heartfelt retrospective." —The Christian Century
"Every now and then a book comes along to light a fire underneath you. The Heart of American Poetry is such a volume... . This exquisite book ... pulses with love; it is enlightening and reassuring on the why of poetry and the why of ourselves. Every shelf should have a place for this collection—warm yourselves in its glow." —The Irish Independent
This information about The Heart of American Poetry was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Edward Hirsch is a celebrated poet and champion for poetry. He is the author of ten books of poems and six books of prose and has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Rome Prize, a Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal of Honor, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for literature. He serves as president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and lives in Brooklyn.
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