Gabriel

An unforgettable account of the life and death of the poet's son, Gabriel.

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. He tells the story of how a once unstoppable child, who suffered from various developmental disorders, turned into a tattooed, impulsive, rebellious young adult. 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 poem enters the broad stream of human grief and raises in us the strange hope, even consolation, we find in the writer's act of witnessing.

Edward Hirsch is the author of eight collections of poetry, including Wild Gratitude, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and, most recently, The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems. He has published several prose books, among them How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, a national best seller. His numerous awards include a MacArthur Fellowship. A longtime teacher in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, Hirsch is now the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.