“Hirschhorn’s poetry has weight and its transcendental imagery communicates what it is to be human and in contact with the universe… This is generous poetry with metaphors that provide a key to mapping experience… his poetry is vital and energetic. These are surprising peoms that explore the cycles of life, renewal and death.”

—Nick Nolet, The Wolf, U.K.

 

“The poems that hooked me were the last twelve, ‘Finland: A Suite of Seasons’, chronicling a year in Helsinki. Hirschhorn is so in love with the otherness of the place—its light, its sibilant language—that he drops the cosmic tone and simply describes it.”

—Marcia Menter, 2007, Sphinx Chapbook Reviews.

 

“The second verse of ‘Excerpts From A Field Guide to North American Trees’ I read over and over because it is such an ordinary thing to walk beneath a tree but such extraordinary way to describe it”

—The Common Reader, 2007, Sphinx Chapbook Reviews.

SAILING WITH THE PLEIADES

 

Even as I jog the lanes of New Haven,

speeds up to three one-thousandths

a kilometer a second, saying hi there!

to the flower seller, the one-armed peddler,

and caretaker Bill of the Grove Street Cemetery —

 

Earth twirls me on its hip, west to east,

gyrating through seasons, and Sun pilots

its argosy of planets, asteroids around

the Milky Way — two hundred fifty million years

to make one tour — while our dear little galaxy

 

sails on: silent, ghostly, accelerating

in free fall toward that terrible crystal:

God.

God?  Who created Himself from Nothing?

 

But He’s running away from us,

the speed of light;

ahhh let Him go, trouble from the start,

or where was He when we needed Him most?

 

And another thing:

the way a tide in Hokkaido cancels

a wave on Cape Cod,

consider that I am alone this night,

running the lanes of the graveyard,

abandoned at the speed of thought,

eyes shut tight, not moving at all.