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."
