An acclaimed poet and our greatest champion for poetry offers an inspiring and insightful new reading of the American tradition We live in unsettled times. What is America and who are we as a people? How do we understand the dreams and betrayals that have shaped the American experience? For poet and critic Edward Hirsch, poetry opens up new ways of answering these questions, of reconnecting with one another and with whats best in us. In this landmark new book from Library of America, Hirsch offers deeply personal readings of forty essential American poems we thought we knewfrom Anne Bradstreets The Author to Her Book and Phillis Wheatleys To S.M. a Young African Painter, on seeing his Works to Garrett Hongos Ancestral Graves, Kahuku and Joy Harjos Rabbit Is Up to Tricksexploring how these poems have sustained his own life and how they might uplift our diverse but divided nation. This is a personal book about American poetry, writes Hirsch, but I hope it is more than a personal selection. I have chosen forty poems from our extensive archive and songbook that have been meaningful to me, part of my affective life, my critical consideration, but I have also tried to be cognizant of the changing playbook in American poetry, which is not fixed but fluctuating, ever in flow, to pay attention to the wider consideration, the appreciable reach of our literature. This is a book of encounters and realizations.
