Stranger By Night
by Edward Hirsch
Alfred A. Knopf, 2020
Review by Leonard Kress
When I first delved into Edward Hirsch’s new collection (his tenth), Stranger by Night, my inclination was to avoid any evaluation and analysis and simply read his poem “In the Valley,” in its entirety. Nothing more. My reasoning was that if you were moved by this poem, then you’d love the entire collection—and most likely, his entire opus. “In the Valley” recreates Hirsch’s experience as a young teacher in a Catholic school in the Lehigh Valley of upstate Pennsylvania. It is one of several poems in the collection that is steeped in nostalgia and longing and the sense of being an outsider in a faith tradition he was not part of, but one to which he felt a deep connection:
You were a sceptic
in the Valley of the Lord
who carried “Pied Beauty in your jacket pocket…
and learning how to stand
at a blackboard
with an open book
and praise
the unfathomable
mystery of being
to children…
Hirsch mixes it all together—his mystic stance, his love of Gerard Manley Hopkins, his tentative role in society. Then again, in “Windber Field,” in a different school, in a different part of the state, he’s teaching Wilfred Owen to teenagers urging them cherish as well as mourn the tragedies that beset their communities:
In the tiny high school class
in western Pennsylvania
…soon they were writing
about smokeless coal
and black seams
in the ground, the terror
of firedamp, the Rolling Mill
Mine Disaster in Johnstown…
He is Tolstoy teaching the children, an image I don’t think he’d object to.
Hirsch’s poems are often nostalgic, presenting some experience or constellation of experiences that lead the poet (and presumably the reader) to heartbreak, sadness, and world-weariness—with a smidgen of hope that it’s all worth it. Not that the poems ever resolve anything, but they establish that things happened, that they happened to him, that others witnessed it (including the reader), and that suffices.
It’s not only youth that captivates Hirsch. He is equally drawn to old age and death—the death of others as well as his own impending death. There are almost a dozen poems that are either direct elegies or reminiscences of his poetic mentors and cohorts. These include William Meredith (“After the Stroke”), Mark Strand (“In Memory of Mark Strand”), and Philip Levine (“Biding Nowhere”). There are other poems about friends’ unveilings and cremations. More interesting, perhaps, at least from a voyeuristic perspective, are the poems about his own mortality. In “Stranger by Night,” Hirsch writes about the precariousness of simply walking through the city:
After I lost
my peripheral vision…
the stairs descending
precipitously
into the subway station
and I apologized
to every one
of those strangers
jostling me
in a world that had grown
stranger by night.
His difficulties navigating the world aren’t limited to physical decline and a feeling of superfluousness; they extend to how he views others and how others view him. He describes stumbling out of a cemetery and catching sight of an attractive woman, one who in the past surely would have aroused his erotic curiosity:
I didn’t even pause to wonder
about a young woman
lifting her veil
and applying lipstick…
for once I didn’t look back.
The dying goes on, it never stops.
Surprisingly, Hirsch’s sense of resignation and the extinguished passion that accompany his aging are not so different from his poems about youthful adventures and work. In “Days of 1975,” he relates a visit to New York, where he naively enters the first bar he spots and, hoping for some excitement, sits down next to a woman who advises him
to make the smart play
and leave forty bucks
on the counter
and head for the door
while you can still walk
because she suspects that he’s narc. So much for the expected trope—the young man from the provinces who takes the city by storm. Hirsch’s poems about work are equally disheartening. The notion that manual labor is spiritually uplifting—he’s from Chicago, after all, city of the big shoulders and Studs Terkel—remains unrealized. In the end, work is more funereal than fun and always suffused with hints of sexual disappointment and frustration:
You could almost forget
you were coupling
and uncoupling
freight cars
at a hump yard
on the graveyard shift
(“On the Engine?)
…………………
That’s the job, he said
shrugging his shoulders
and running his hand
through his hair, like Dante
or a spider.
(“The Brakeman”)
Reading these poems, which I freely and enthusiastically admit to liking and being moved by, I’m also pricked by a sense that Hirsch’s poetry is a throwback (or elegy) to bygone days and bygone poetry. Most of the figures that populate his poems are male and the women are either romantic interests who reject him or teachers, nuns, nurses, or mothers. A few non-white figures appear—after all, he grew up hard by Chicago and any excursion into the city would likely include a foray into a blues bars on the South Side. Clearly, though, these are poems of privilege. And experiences like he had as a seventeen-year-old lead to poetry, not prison:
Your friends are sniffing glue
from a paper bag
in the back of an Impala
tooling around Niles.
(“To My Seventeen Year Old Self”)
The fact that the writer is eminently likeable and smart and compassionate doesn’t change that. Or perhaps doesn’t offer enough mitigation. Still, I like Hirsch the poet; I would love to sit beside him on a barstool. In his poems, I find a sincere, pleasing, and compatible spirit—one with whom I share a poetic ethos and aesthetic.