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)