Selections from Edward Hirsch’s new book The Living Fire, an exclusive video interview speaking about what matters most in poetry, a reading of the daring poem “Milk”, and a special video on Pablo Neruda’s exile. Edward Hirsch photographed by Viktoria Krane on THE LIVING FIRE Edited by Flavia Rocha “Poetry tries to take a stand against time. It speaks against our vanishing, it speaks... 

by Edward Hirsch You’re sitting at a small bay window in an empty café by the sea. It’s nightfall, and the owner is locking up, though you’re still hunched over the radiator, which is slowly losing warmth. Now you’re walking down to the shore to watch the last blues fading on the waves. You’ve lived in small houses, tight spaces— the walls around you kept closing in— but the sea and... 

by Edward Hirsch These ravens gathering on the breach in the battered blue light of dusk are a sudden unkindness The path heading up the house strays off into a vague straggle like a thought that has gone too far That sliver peering through the clouds looks like a bell that can no longer ring in an abandoned church steeple I don’t mind the mindless fog but my room at the top of the stairs tilts like... 

by Edward Hirsch Railroad tracks split the campus in half and at night you’d lie on your narrow cot and listen to the lonely whistle of a train crossing the prairie in the dark. View all of Edward Hirsch’s content What do you think? Join the conversation!  Read More →

by Edward Hirsch My mother wouldn’t be cowed into nursing and decided that formula was healthier than the liquid from her breasts. And so I never sucked a single drop from the source, a river dried up. It was always bottled for me. But one night in my mid-thirties in a mirrored room off Highway 59 a woman who had a baby daughter turned to me with an enigmatic smile and cupped my face in her chapped... 

by Edward Hirsch It was the two of us, wasn’t it, on those steamy nights circling the low-slung museum across the street and lingering by the pond behind the chapel. It’s how the southern clouds passed slowly overhead, season after season, year after year, as you followed a low intricate scent across the stately lit lawn, and studied the squirrels in the live oaks, and waded into the brown reflecting...