The Night Parade: Poems

by Edward Hirsch

"Edward Hirsch's gifts include an emotional richness coupled with a precise sense of language and metaphor, which makes his best poems wonderful to read."
—Stephen Dobyns, New York Times Book Review

"Hirsch possesses an uncanny vividness of memory springing, it seems, from an infinite fund of affection and sadness...There is a wonderful simplicity and clarity in the best of these poems."
—Liz Rosenberg, Philadelphia Inquirer

Straightforward and precise, these poems...beckon the reader with their immediacy...With humility and passion, Hirsch illuminates the contradictory resilience and weakness of the human spirit."
— Publishers Weekly

Genres: Poetry, American

96 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1989

About the author

Edward Hirsch is a celebrated poet and peerless advocate for poetry. He was born in Chicago in 1950—his accent makes it impossible for him to hide his origins—and educated at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph.D. in Folklore. His devotion to poetry is lifelong.He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal of Honor, the Prix de Rome, and an Academy of Arts and Letters Award. In 2008, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
bio-img
Edward Hirsch’s first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers (1981), received the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. His second collection, Wild Gratitude (1986), won the National Book Critics Award.
Since then, he has published six additional books of poems: The Night Parade (1989), Earthly Measures (1994),On Love (1998), Lay Back the Darkness (2003), Special Orders (2008), and The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of poems.Hirsch is also the author of five prose books, including A Poet’s Glossary (2014), the result of decades of passionate study, Poet’s Choice (2006), which consists of his popular columns from the Washington Post Book World, and How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), a national bestseller. He is the editor of Theodore Roethke’s Selected Poems (2005) and co-editor of The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology (2008). He also edits the series “The Writer’s World” (Trinity University Press).Edward Hirsch taught for six years in the English Department at Wayne State University and seventeen years in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. He is now president of the
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Reviews

[Ken]

Some powerful poems about family in here, but the long historical poems are more mundane, reading like paragraphs set to stanzas. Examples: A long go about the bubonic plague and then again about the history of Chicago. But when Hirsch turns his attention closer to home--Grandma, Grandpa, Mother, Father, sister the pitcher, etc., kismet!

[Kasandra]

Not a bad book of poetry, and I learned a little about Chicago history, which was enjoyable - but for the most part, not my cup of tea. The narratives often read more like prose than poetry, and the family history didn't grab me or linger in memory. I did enjoy "Memorandums" (opening poem), "In the Underground Garage", "The Abortion (1969)" (my favorite), and "Cross Portrait", about two painters simultaneously painting portraits of each other - very well done.

[J.Aleksandr Wootton]

I very much liked poems #2 and #3 in this collection, but none of the others stood out to me. Most lines were too baldfaced to be interesting; a few were too oblique.

From a used bookstore thou camest;
Unto a used bookstore shalt be returned.

[J & J]

My favorite poems: My Grandmother's Bed, My Grandfather's Poems, Siblings, My Father's Back, Execution, Rapture, The Abortion (1969), Infertility

[Rich Farrell]

Hirsch's poetry, especially when it's personal, is beautiful. Much of his family writing, like "My Grandmother's Bed" is touching and others, like "The Abortion (1969)" can be haunting.

[Lynne]

...proof that going back to poems you've read some time ago can be a wonderful retreat!

[Erin]

Fine. Didn’t love it as much this time around.

[Charles]

Pretty enjoyable.