52 Books in 52 Weeks, it's called. The challenge is simple: read a book every week for a year.
56. Wild gratitude.
After having so enjoyed Hirsch’s How to read a poem, I was curious to read his own efforts. Wild Gratitude shares a title with his meditation on Kit Smart’s ode to his cat Jeoffrey, which poem was featured in his book of appreciation as well. The collection swings between poems of this kind, poems of appreciation for grace and beauty in the natural world, and poems of striking anger, despair and fatalism. Most of them are formal, and you can appreciate the hours he must have spent conforming them to strict meter. They also skew longer than many I’ve read recently, and so the read is more challenging, though I welcomed the exercise. Hirsch is deft with image, and with plain-speak, elevating the everyday with his poetry, though often in the service of a dark view of the world. Slipped in the pages of this used-book-store-copy was a clipping from what looks to be The New Yorker, the last lines of which are a good example of the skill – and tenor – of the rest of the book:
Let five o’clock come
with its bandages of light.
A life buoy in bruised waters.
The first broken plank of morning.
