STYLE OF WRITING

 Hirsch, whose own lyric poetry yokes together an intrinsic intellect and a profound emotional depth, has been an unflagging advocate for the art. For more than twenty-five years in essays and newspaper columns, at conferences and festivals, in classrooms and auditoriums, at galas and fundraisers he has proselytized, taught, and championed poets and poetry of every ethnic and aesthetic stripe.

Hirsch is at his best when he has not become weighted down by sentimentality. The poet sets out to write heartfelt verse without pandering to cheap sentiment. This terrific formal scope reflects the wanderings of a poet who travels vast distances in his poems, inward and outward, across time and space, between praise and lamentation. 

Hirsch has written elegiac and tender poems about his childhood, his family, and his Jewish heritage. He has also written poems that wield a shrewd historical consciousness, taking on such subjects as the devastating European plague of the fourteenth century, torture in the twentieth century, and the Chicago fire of 1871. His poems have traversed the gritty, urban decay of the American city; the sunstruck peaks of Greece; the windswept, scoured absence of the early plains; and numerous other real, imagined, and mythic landscapes. He has written heartrending elegies and soaring homages to artistic geniuses as varied as Art Pepper, Paul Celan, and Georgia O'Keefe. In fact, Hirsch's poetry tends to be a gathering place for a whole cast of literary and cultural figures, from Simone Weil to Henry James, from Wallace Stevens to Orpheus.

Hirsch believes in the poetic craft, he does not believe in form over content. For him, form must serve the subtle purpose of exposing the heart of the matter. He does not wish, though, to make his journey and the reader’s journey so obvious that the poem becomes nothing more than an advertisement. He has spoken often of the duty required of the “informed” reader. The reader not only must carry the poet’s “message home” but also “must decipher it as a linguistic event, as a rhythmic group of words packed with salt, as a last will and testament.”