{"product_id":"9780375710025","title":"Lay Back the Darkness","description":"\u003cp\u003eEdward Hirsch’s sixth collection is a descent into the darkness of middle age, narrated with exacting tenderness. He explores the boundaries of human fallibility both in candid personal poems, such as the title piece—a plea for his father, a victim of Alzheimer’s wandering the hallway at night—and in his passionate encounters with classic poetic texts, as when Dante’s Inferno enters his bedroom:\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhen you read Canto Five aloud last night in your naked, singsong, fractured Italian, \u003cbr\u003emy sweet compulsion, my carnal appetite, \u003cbr\u003eI suspected we shall never be forgiven for devouring each other body and soul . . . \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom the lighting of a Yahrzeit candle to the drawings by the children of Terezin, Hirsch longs for transcendence in art and in the troubled history of his faith. In “The Hades Sonnets,” the ravishing series that crowns the collection, the poet awakens full of grief in his wife’s arms, but here as throughout, there is a luminous forgiveness in his examination of our sorrows. Taken together, these poems offer a profound engagement with our need to capture what is passing (and past) in the incandescence of language.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47012418355440,"sku":"9780375710025","price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780375710025_p0.jpg?v=1763691624","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780375710025","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}