I am reading Edward Hirsch’s “How to Read
a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry”. It
is his own Ode to poetry…a Hymn of praise…264 pages long. It is a love letter to the poems that touch
his heart, bring meaning to his life arouse his feelings and that enrich and
comfort him.
In 2011, Hirsch experienced the sudden
loss of his son, Gabriel and found no solace in the poems that once impassioned
his heart and quieted his mind. Gabriel, 22 years of age, died
from the club drug GHB that someone gave him at a party. It was a harrowing three days before Hirsch found out what had happened to his son.
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| Father and son - Blois, France - Kathleen Tyler Conklin |
Hirsch stopped reading and writing poetry
after this traumatic shock. But he began
to record the memories of his son by talking with friends and relatives,
writing them down compulsively and haphazardly.
After a while his outpouring of words began to take the shape of a
poem. It became a 70 page elegy to his son;
a book length poem recently published called “Gabriel”. The New Yorker called it a “masterpiece of
sorrow”.
The poem is written in three-line stanzas
without punctuation…a kind of stream of consciousness, a deluge of memories,
love and grief. Perhaps an effort to
etch Gabriel’s spirit on the page...to bring him to life with words. Hirsch
admits he put everything he could into his poem, but also had to face what
poetry could not do. His passion had
been cooled by this tragedy. He had a
new awareness…that poetry has limits. “It cannot give us back the people we
have lost.”
And yet, in a sense by writing this
astounding elegy, Hirsch has given Gabriel to us.
