[Young] poets who are too careful sometimes dry up. Edward Hirsch is not cautious, and his first book, For the Sleepwalkers …, is uneven. Nevertheless, his failures suggest promise, and at his best he speaks with authority.

The brave opening, "Song Against Natural Selection," proclaims that "The weak survive!"—a sentiment in keeping with Hirsch's willingness to face up to failure. This poem, though happens to be a complete success…. The formal structure, making the reader only belatedly aware of rhyme, complements the wry acceptance of loss.

I suspect that Hirsch is fond of the French "Homage" (those elegies written at somebody's tomb) because of the chance it gives him to indulge his mimetic gifts, not merely out of an admiration of Baudelaire and Verlaine. He is a good imitator, and some of these poems—transposing Lorca to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, or Vallejo to a soup kitchen in Paris—are wonderfully effective. Still, it is easy to sound inept mimicking dead poets. Hirsch's "At the Grave of Marianne Moore" is prefaced with her famous dictum: "Whatever it is, let it be without affectation." Although he copies Moore's quirky style without trouble, since it is not native to him he does 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)