"Whatever it is, let it be without affectation." Although he copies Moore's quirky style without trouble, since it is not native to him hedoes sound affected. He also stoops to an occasional bad pun unworthy of Moore…. And when Hirsch praises Moore because "her scrupulous method / in verse bequeathed us a heritage / the honesty of her intelligence," he cannot mean this to sound as prosy and patronizing as it does. These lapses notwithstanding, it is obvious that Moore's precise eye has influenced Hirsch in the better poems than this one.

Hirsch's tributes to great poets are merely one manifestation of his preoccupation with the artist's role. In "The Acrobat," he uses the training of a young circus performer as a metaphor for the disciplines required in mastering any art….

Following the motions of its protagonist, "The Acrobat" revolves in a spiral: from the outsider's admiration of the graceful contortions, to the apprentice's disgust at the ugliness of some of the tricks of the trade, then full circle to an appreciation of the "dignity and great courage" required to perfect one's control. Finally, the acrobat swings out to merge with his art…. I admire Edward Hirsch for his mystical vision, for the mastery he has already attained—and for his daring (p. 15)

Phoebe Pettingell, "Taking Chances in Verse," in The New Leader, Vol. LXV, No. 5, March 8, 1982, pp. 14-15.∗

Edward Hirsch writes in For the Sleepwalkers with a slight, somewhat self-conscious, formality, as if he wishes to hold his material in place by distancing himself from it. He achieves this formality—and it is an achievement—by following regular stanza patterns and metering stresses in a given line; in addition, he elevates his diction so that his poetry becomes, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, "the common language heightened." Thus, he opens "Dusk":

      The sun is going down tonight       like a wounded stag staggering through the brush       with an enormous spike in its heart       and a single moan in its lungs. There       is a light the color of tarnished metal       galloping at its side, and fresh blood       is steaming through its throat. Listen!       The waves, too, sound like the plunging       of hooves, or a wild hart simply       crumpling on the ground.

He ends this lovely poem:

                     And now here is the night            with its false promise of sleep, its wind            leafing through the grass, its vacant            spaces between stars, its endless memory            of a world going down like a stag.

Hirsch might well have avoided the unfortunate "stag staggering," but one can forgive such a small lapse of taste in a poem so vivid, musical, and richly allusive. The reference to Pascal's terrifying, infinite spaces between the stars at the close is typical of Hirsch's learning, which he wears lightly. If you don't "get" the allusions in his work, it doesn't really matter: the poem will still be an experience worth having; if you do catch them, a whole string of bells will go off in your head.

For the Sleepwalkers traces the poet's descent into the dark, that nether region of the imagination where "We have to learn the desperate faith of sleep- / walkers who rise out of their calm beds / and walk through the skin of another life." That, from the title poem, provides a key to this book, in which Hirsch inhabits, poem by poem, dozens of other skins. He can become Rimbaud, Rilke, Paul Klee, or Matisse, in each case convincingly. Or he can speak as a diner waitress in Arkansas…. Whatever guises Hirsch takes on, he does so with gusto, and his poems easily fulfill Auden's request that poems be, above all else, "memorable language." (p. 39)

Jay Parini, "A New Generation of Poets," in The New Republic, Vol. 186, No. 15, April 14, 1982, pp. 37-9.∗

Edward Hirsch's For the Sleepwalkers is [a] surprising first book—surprising not just for its quality but for its literary sophistication as well. Hirsch's poems fall into that vague, hard to define category of the post-modern; he has read the American surrealists, he has learned from John Ashbery. Poets in this tradition generally value technique at least as much as they do content, a fact evident just in the large amount of verbal experimentation they engage in. As Ashbery did as a young writer, Hirsch here tries his hand against the rigorous limitations of such forms as the sestina. (All poets do this kind of thing now and then, but the technical play involved is important enough to the likes of Ashbery and Hirsch that they print the results.) The immediate payoff from this experimentation is a tightness of imagery in many of Hirsch's poems; that is, rather than accumulate many images in a given poem, he will set up a few rather complex ones and then repeat and modulate them throughout the work.

Hirsch regularly offers the unexpected. The first several poems in his book are amusing, playful, outrageous, as when a buzzard delivers this "Apologia" for his kind: "A violent muscle is / pumping blood through a few scattered clouds / until a violent color sizzles up in the ground. / I, too, have a heart and wings, and I / say that a single pulse animates the world." (p. 444)

[The] literature of post-modernism—prose and poetry—is often less interested in truth, meaning, and content than in the pleasures of pure technique, making it a sort of latter-day art for art's sake. But again the poems of Edward Hirsch turn out to be exceptional. As this book progresses, a sense of elegiac tenderness begins to emerge more and more clearly. (p. 445)

Most impressive of all is a four-part elegy [in the fifth section of this book] entitled "The Dark Sun." Its concluding section is called "Dusk: Elegy for the Dark Sun":

            A sword is bandaged in the clouds.             Call it the sun, though others             May think it's an anchor             Sunk in the sky, or a knife             Carved into the leaves.             But call it the sun. And call             The hands pressed to its face             The clouds, though others may think             They're a blanket containing heat             Or four shoes clapped onto a horse.             That horse can run. And call the field             Where it runs the sky, and the stable             Where it rests the sea. And the hay             That it eats is blue and yellow.             Call it the rain and the wind.             These imaginings make it possible             To survive, to endure the hard light,             Though darkness is floating in.             And that thing breaking in my chest             Is more than a heart; it is also             The sun bandaged in a sheath of clouds             And thrown up over the waves             Like a lifebuoy, like a hand             Trying to call its fellow men.

The profusion of metaphor here is astonishing, though all of the figures coalesce around and add meaning to a few central images—sun, hands, heart—conveying a strong impression of wounding, of degeneration, of decay, of time passing all too relentlessly. The arbitrary quality of the imagery ("Call it the sun, though others / May think") emphasizes the central fact that individual perception determines reality in this century…. Central to this poem, of course, is the ultimate justification for this kind of poetry, pulling Hirsch's work well out of the art-for-art's-sake category: "These imaginings make it possible / To survive, to endure the hard light, / Though darkness is floating in."… Hirsch's is not a solipsistic art—these poems of wonder and consolation are not dedicated to his own precious soul, but comment on the world, lovely and rapacious by turns, that we all inhabit. (pp. 445-46)

Peter Stitt, "The Objective Mode in Contemporary Lyric Poetry," in The Georgia Review, Vol. XXXVI, No. 2, Summer, 1982, pp. 438-48.∗

Hirsch comes to poetry as to a wind-up toy. He plays with it, turns it inside out, breaks and mends it, plays. Sometimes it ticks like Gertrude Stein…. Sometimes it spins on the axis of its own silliness…. [A] kind of slapstick abounds. When he can restrain himself, Hirsch is better. He prefers the expressionist portrait ("The Enigma: Rilke," or the sweet "Matisse") or a stew of dissolves and associations ("Cocks," "Reminiscence of Carousels and Civil War"). This poet has talent, but it is vitiated by a coy or dizzy self-indulgence: updated Dada. As a result, the poems [in For the Sleepwalkers] aren't memorable. But from scattered hints, from a colorful diction and a rhythmic surety, it may be predicted that he can—and will—write a more substantial book than this: one for the wide-awake.

J. D. McClatchy, in a review of "For the Sleepwalkers," in Poetry, Vol. CXL, No. 6, September, 1982, p. 347.