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)